Forget Google Reader. Here's Star Wars Reader

Chris Taylor2013-04-19 00:55:25 UTC

Still bummed about the fact that Google is killing its RSS feed service, Google Reader, on July 1? Us too.

But there are other ways to read the headlines from your favorite websites. We've covered a bunch of Google Reader replacements — including Feedly, which now says it has gained 3 million new users since the Google Reader shutdown was announced in March.

But none of those replacements have quite the pizzazz of StarRSS, a feed reader based on the opening crawl from every Star Wars movie. With John Williams' famous music blaring in the background, even the most mundane of headlines looks exciting. (Unless it's a headline about a taxation dispute involving the Trade Federation, that is.)

For example, to see what Mashable's RSS feed looks like in Star Wars format, click here. Click on any headline as it blasts past into space to go straight to that story. (And replace the Mashable part of the URL to make any other site's feed look Star Wars-y.)

StarRSS is the brainchild of a user at the online open source software collective GitHub known only as fotcorn. It's a simple piece of JavaScript code using assets supplied by another GitHub user, Artem Avetisyan.

We doubt those materials are open source, exactly — as the Register recently pointed out, the majority of stuff on GitHub is released without regard to license. So enjoy the power of this fully operational RSS reader while it lasts.

Image courtesy of fotcorn

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