Welcome to the home page of the SyndStore™ news syndication system project.

SyndStore is a web based news aggregation system that uses a database back end to store RSS Feed News items and other information and uses a web front end to display the categorised news feeds and information.

Access to information in the database can also be made via an API that allow different clients to display the news articles gathered. Examples of these clients are included such as a scrolling marquee extension to the Firefox browser.

Like another project published on Sourceforge from PyeNet Universal this project was developed to "scratch an itch" where I wanted more control over the news information I was scanning than was being provided by standalone RSS Feed Aggregators.

The SyndStore system has been coded using several languages including Perl, Javascript and CSS.

SyndStore Architecture

Back end

The SyndStore uses a MySQL database to store RSS Feed news and other information. Two standalone Perl scripts are scheduled to maintain the data in the database. The first script scans the RSS Feeds and other news sources for new items and adds these to the articles table. The second script is scheduled to run daily to remove older articles from the database to allow some control over the database size. A third script allows for the automatic backup of the SyndStore database.

Front end

To display the stored news items SyndStore provides dynamically generated web pages that use Perl CGI scripts to access the database and generate the web pages. The pages allow the news items to be viewed in several different ways for example; the Latest News listing, a Random Selection, or via saved searches with the My News feature. The web interface also allows the user to maintain the store by allowing the addition and deletion of RSS Feeds. Rearranging the display order of the news items and to change and record display preferences.

The API

Information stored in the database can be accessed via an API that allows for different forms and amounts of news to be downloaded. The API works over HTTP requests and information is returned in XML formatted documents.