Patrick Beeson

Information seekers in Knoxville, TN have a new way to get the latest headlines and information from the best of the city's Web sites. It's called Knox'd, and it is my latest side-project I developed in partnership with soon-to-be fellow Scripps project manager Casey Peters.

Knox'd has one goal: to aggregate the latest news and information (including jobs, real estate and classified listings), in one location. It seeks to fill the technology gap between the folks that use RSS (me), and the folks that don't. The latter accounts for the vast majority of Internet users, according to a Pew Internet report.

But more importantly, Knox'd was a project that allowed me to continue to build my Web development skills in order to start building solutions to solve problems in information distribution.

Find the latest headlines from the best of Knoxville on the newly launched local information aggregator Knox'd.

How Knox'd works

Knox'd is a feed aggregator, meaning it doesn't generate original content -- it simply brings together data from specific feeds in an organized manner. Organized, in this case, is by categories such as news, sports, business, health and blogs as well as real estate, jobs and classified (items for sale). In this way, it's not a lot different than most mainstream media outlets it depends on.

I blogged about this technology in response to the launch of a Web site called This is Roanoke back in August 2007.

The site differentiates itself by recognizing that the average Web user probably doesn't hold an allegiance to a particular media source for news. A Google search pulls the most relevant content for the given query -- Knox'd pulls together Knoxville-centric information.

We've seeded the site with some of the most prominent media and social media, and will be adding more in the near future. Also, we're pulling in listings from Kijiji, Yahoo! Hotjobs (via knoxnews), real estate listings from knoxnews and Craigslist. As long as the feed validates and is local, we'll consider it for addition.

How Knox'd is built

As stated on the site's about page, Knox'd owes much to the source code released for the Django community aggregator. The site is built in Django, and uses James Bennett's excellent contact_form and template_utils apps. I also wrote a Python script that with it's companion crontab, removes feed data older than 30 days. This was needed to keep the database from filling up to quickly.

Development on the site is far from done however. I plan to write a script for providing RSS feeds for each category, which will be in addition to the current feed for all of the latest feed items aggregated on the site. You can also access this in a "river" format, which is perfect for mobile browsers.

In fact, the mobile accessibility is one of the most exciting features of this site.

The design was a joint effort between Casey, who also deserves credit for the site concept, and myself. He contributed the great logo, while I wrote the markup and CSS with a layout inspired by a flyer I found in a Sunday New York Times a few weeks back. We plan to evolve the design overtime with feedback from users.

And for now, Knox'd runs on a Dreamhost shared server with a MySQL database.

Got a feed (or just feedback)? Let us know!

If you have a feed that you think should be featured on Knox'd, please let us know by using the site's contact form. Your feed must validate; we can help you here if it doesn't.

Also let us know if you think we could improve Knox'd either through the design or by adding new features. Building this site was a learning process, and we love new challenges.