Headline Grabber

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Similar to the Ad-hoc Text problem, another technique I use for improving my Norwegian is to start each day by scanning Norsk news headlines. But can I make it even easier to use?

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For years I’ve used an RSS aggregator app to pull all my news, blog, and web sources into a single convenient interface that I can scan each morning, and for a while, I had added a couple of Norsk sources to that, but I’ve discovered a few wrinkles that have made that suboptimal.

  1. Norsk is actually written in two completely different writing/spelling systems, but none of my aggregator tools let me filter out the one I’m not studying.

  2. Having experienced LingQ’s sentence-by-sentence reading mode, I find that I much prefer it for reading norsk.

  3. I want to be able to filter out articles that really don’t interest me - sports, financial, farm reports, fashion, etc. - but my RSS aggregator doesn’t allow for more complex filtering.

Because of this, I wrote my own “headline grabber” script a while back, which I had intended to feed into the ad-hoc document ingester via the clipboard, but then I realized I can go a step further, and actually build the RSS scanner and filter right into Frankie.

Update later that day

Step 1 was to simply use the new Ad-Hoc Note feature, which I’m calling Jot, that can create the note by cutting and pasting from the existing headline grabber. Works a treat. Notice the highlighted document.

But even so, executing it inside Frankie directly, at the touch of a button will be sweeter.


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