RSS Alerter, part 1
My family decided for me what my next project will be - they just don't know it. I currently maintain 3 blogs: This one, for programming- and geek-related topics, KyleBits.com for personal (non-geeky) rants, and a family-oriented blog for news/photos/etc about my wife and me. These are not just there to hear myself ramble (ok, maybe a little), but also to keep my extended family up to date. The trouble is, none of them apparently read the blogs!
RSS is a wonderful thing for bringing news and other info to your door, if you happen to be a tech-savvy person that's interested in that sort of thing. My family is neither. An RSS reader is overkill them. What's needed here is a program that sits unobtrusively in the system tray, and alerts them (with balloon help or toast) when there has been an update to one of their feeds. Clicking the toast will take them to the page in their browser (a familiar interface). And, for the sake of my non-technical family, it needs to be pre-configured to check my 2 other feeds.
I did a quick search and the stuff I could find wasn't quite what I was looking for ... and it's more fun to write it. So, it's time to start building...