This is a site update. I’ve added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program ‘zFeeder‘. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under ‘B L O G R O L L’, these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It’s a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I’m interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

The categories include:

DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.

This is what got me going here. CNN.com (plus Money.com and SI.com) recently launched RSS feeds. Members of my team were involved in that effort, and I started thinking a lot more about how to use these. I’ve tried RSS Readers, but found that going to another application was always somewhat annoying – I’d rather do this from the browser. Part of the CNN RSS effort involves distributing these feeds to MyYahoo. So I spent quite a bit of time aggregating my favorite sites into pages there. I realized then that there were tools made for Moveable Type to do this, and tried a few. I eventually settled on zFeeder, a simple-to-install PHP system to acquire, organize and display RSS feeds.

Being PHP-based, the pages display the most recent RSS data, throttled by settings in the zFeeder admin system. So if I set updates to 60 minutes, you can hit reload all you want and the system will only go out to fetch new data based on that setting. Nice!