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Feedabot is a project I’ve been working on over the course of the past few months to help me manage the links that pass through my Twitter feed and a few other RSS feeds. Basically, it monitors various feeds and renders the pages of the links it finds within those feeds. The automated generation of these images allows me to scan through the things people post visually as opposed to having to guess if following any given link is worth my time. It’s been up and running for almost six months now, and has become an invaluable element of my daily internet habits.

The web page previews generated by Feedabot are great for getting an overview of things posted without having to slog through each link one at a time. The ability to tag these images makes it possible to create sets of related pages that can be scanned through visually as well, which feels really nice. Up to this point, the infrastructure I built supported only the rendering of the individual pages. Through discussions with a few of the individuals using the site, it became apparent that digging a bit deeper into the page itself to isolate specific page resources would be a valuable next step. As a result, I’ve spent the past week or so thinking about how to isolate and extract interesting data from each page and presenting it to the user directly, without requiring them to visit the page itself to watch a video or view an image. My last blog post was related to these efforts as I was trying to programmatically extract regions of high text density on a given page and present these subregions to the user. While this approach appears to work reasonably well, it still needs some work, and I’ve chosen to leave this ‘text region clipping’ for future Feedabot update should I be able to address the current challenges it presents. Currently, the Feedabot engine is only extracting images and embedded videos, which are displayed as a Javascript-based popup when clicked.

The end result is that image and video resources found within a page can be previewed with a click of the mouse in a manner reminiscent of Apple’s Quick Look. Play video and see quick previews of images from rendered pages without leaving Feedabot. I’m pleased.

For now, I’m making this feature accessible only to registered Feedabot users, so if you’d like an account, you’ll have to email me to request one.