Archive for January, 2011

Kindle RSS and Kindle Newsletter

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

I have written two scripts, not WordPress plugins, but standalone programs that will send a web page or an RSS feed to a user’s kindle.

One is a newsletter program that accepts a list of Kindle user ids and emails and sends them all the same web page. This would be useful for sending out newsletters directly to a user’s Kindle. Since you can read Kindle documents on the PC, iPad, Android, or Blackberry, the newsletter would be readable by all of these. It is currently limited in that it takes time to run and times out after a bit. I have to make it so it refreshes itself after every user.

The other lets a user subscribe to an RSS feed. The program will take a web site’s RSS and translate it into a simple web page and send it to a kindle.

I have to write a cron job to ship off the RSS at a scheduled time, but since I don’t actually have any subscribers, this can wait.

What should I do with these ideas?

1) I can incorporate these into WordPress. Thousands of people install my plugins, but make absolutely no money at it.

2) I can sell the code (and sell it once to a developer and never make money at it again). Actually, it is a simple concept and I am surprised that there seems to be nobody else who’s thought of it.

3) I can make a service site for people to sign up for newsletters, or RSS feeds and make money from the websites or users either through advertising or charging for some aspect of the service. I would need web entrepreneur to do this as this would require a few thousand dollars in funding that I am not willing to spend. The website would need to run in a cloud and require some horsepower.

4) I can dick around with it and see if I get a better idea.

I choose option 4) for now.