I’ve updated the Duke River, at dukeriver.co, to use the new River5 river-of-news RSS aggregator created by Dave Winer.
The Duke River is a river of news for Duke University, my employer. Duke River displays the few dozen newsfeeds I’ve been able to find from across the university and medical center, and it helps me get a better sense of the news, announcements and activities at Duke. (I’ve left off the sports and calendar feeds for now; otherwise, there’d be even more to watch.)
I wrote about the Duke River in this earlier post.
I’m especially happy about this update. River5 was super easy to install on my Mac to run a local version of Duke River. Then I figured out how to install River5 on my Webfaction account. Webfaction has a one-click installation of Node.js, and a good help desk that told me how to use the correct assigned port. Moving to Webfaction will save me money I was paying to Amazon AWS. I also figured out how to use Forever to keep the script running, and Dave and others on the support list told me how to pull the correct river file into the html page you see at dukeriver.co.
Now that I have a stable, flowing Duke River, I can begin to promote it at Duke, and encourage others to use River5 to create their own news rivers.
© Anton Zuiker