Ladies, gentlemen and strange guys surfing the web in their boxers,
I give you the latest creation in the gotshoo.com family:
After getting fed up with navigating newspaper websites, I decided to create a tool that would allow a surfer (you) to browse all articles available on a newspaper website in one scroll of the browser. Nothing is more aggravating than trying to hunt for police beat and being stuck in an endless clicking cycle in high school sports.
Grittr is based off the same technology that operates spfldbloggers.com which fetches feeds of local Springfield, Illinois blogs. Once a newspaper updates their RSS feeds, Grittr will go out and fetch the feeds, store the links, and display the tag lines in a clean and easy format. Clicking the tag line will send the surfer to the article on the newspaper’s site.
I developed the site over a few weekends, in the midst of planning a wedding. The site is in its alpha stage right now, meaning that it works but the features I’d like to add aren’t really present yet. I have been sitting on my hands trying to determine, should I tell everyone? After showing a few people and getting positive feedback, I decided it was time. Why keep a great tool like this to myself?
Right now, I’ve only got a few newspaper sites loaded, but more to come.
SJ-R (Springfield, IL)
Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL)
Peoria Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
The Southern (Carbondale, IL)
Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago, IL)
Please let me know what you think, I’ll be posting here the updates that I do.
Holy (bleep), Shoo! I love it. One of the most aggravating things to me about searching newspaper websites is how difficult it is to find all the sections, all the articles, etc. Nice work, my man.
John
You’re amazing. I love it.
What would it take to get my grubby hands on the code of spfldbloggers.com? I’ve been thinking about starting a similar site for blogs in my profession, but I don’t know where to start.
bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com
Make sure you add the sun times. Only Chicago paper worth reading… Fun stuff tho. You’re quite the little mastermind.
Shoo! What the HELL are you doing in Springfield? This is the best thing to hit my monitor since … well … since ever.
GREAT work … I LOVE the SJ-R site!
Thanks everyone!!
Nattie, your wish: http://grittr.com/site/chicagosuntimes
Nice job, Shoo. I guess I’m a Luddite in that I prefer my newspaper in analog form. But this is still really awesome.
Howsabout one for the Post-Dispatch?
Excellent. This is so cool. You are so talented.
AC, the Post’s feeds kinda suck, but I will get it on there.
Marie, stop it!
Seriously Shoo. It’s really great. And soooooo easy to navigate. I love it.
Cool, Nattie. I honestly thought I wasn’t going to get any feedback. I hope to make it even easier, as well as, even cooler.
Thanks again to everyone on the feedback!
Brad, I can help you out a bit. All the stuff I use is open source, so it’s no problem to get your hands on.
Did something happen? I can’t get to any of the Grittr pages.
I broke it. I was working on something and I didn’t fix it. Should be back online tomorrow.