Music.RSStalker.com

This site allows you to enter a list of musicians/bands and generate a custom feed of their album releases. This way you'll never miss a new release. It's very similar to music-alerts.com. The differences are 1) better feed management, 2) feeds for genres, styles and record labels and 3) feeds actually work (I hope). With the music-alerts feed I get a list of 50+ new releases every week, which includes every release for the last 6 of so months. This is annoying because I have to scan through the same list every week to find which are actually new.

I started this site on Nov 6th. I had the 6th and the 7th off from the paying gig, so I got a good chunk of the site done then. I was pretty much ready to launch a week later, but it was about then I realized the Discogs API I was using wasn't all that great. I switched over to Amazon, which took a little while, mostly because I only had nights available to work on it at that point.

Later.RSStalker.com

I had the idea for this site as I was laying in bed on Friday night and coded it up yesterday and today. It might be a little rough, but it doesn't do all that much so it should work pretty well. This app is very similar to Instapaper and Read It Later. It allows you to save a web page for later viewing.

My version doesn't require a sign up or anything to be installed. This means it will work in all browsers. The best part is that is sticks all the saved pages into a personal RSS feed. Since I generally have a huge backlog of items to read in Google Reader it makes sense to add any single pages there as well. Now when I'm looking for something to read I don't have to go to two places.

Both site are built on CakePHP. Not much JavaScript involved in either. I used the same design from the original RSStalker.com, which sped development up considerably. If you have any technical questions about how the sites work I'd be happy to provide details - just leave a comment.