DIY Reader

I've tried Google Reader, Feedly, and other readers, but for me the layouts are too coy about what's inside. Flipboard and other gimmicky aggregators for tablets - those are worse.

I've made do using iGoogle as my homepage, populated exclusively, and manually, with individual widgets for the feeds I want.

But iGoogle is going away. And, as I said, it never was the most elegant feed reader.

Enter Dave Winer's River of News.

I've blogged before about how I used Winer's EC2 for Poets tutoral to get a virtual server running in Amazon's cloud. And I did it again, yesterday, to get a server ready to run Winer's OPML software and generate my own river.

Presto! I have what feels like the reader I have wanted all along!

I'm sure I will play with what feeds go into my "river." I like the idea of having one that is specific to the interests of those who read and engage with this blog. And some lawyer friends and I are already discussing a river that might serve up feeds of active tech law bloggers.