I was trying to find something to refresh my knowledge of Economics and came up with this project, written by some students at Clemson University.

So I went ahead and added Slashdot, Freshmeat and Linux Today news feeds to the site, as you can see on the right The sites make these feeds available by serving an XML file, called a Resource Description File Site Summary (RSS). All you have to do is parse this file, and apply some formatting. This is quite easily done in PHP. I got ready-made PHP scripts for these sites from here. An excellent article on how to use PHP to parse XML RSS feeds can be found here.