Grazr gives you power without responsibility

Grazr is an attractive little viewer for XML and OPML information. Until recently, you needed to find yourself a host machine on which to store the files to be viewed. This was usually okay for the technically-minded because they generally knew where to find such storage (the company server, an ISP server or their blogging platform) and how to upload the files. It was nigh on impossible for anyone else.

Well, a whole bunch of things have happened in the Grazr world recently, the best of which is free hosting for your files and the most astonishingly easy way to create a browser reader for them. This morning David Terrar, a software as a service supplier (but not a techie), blogs about how he got going with Grazr in just a few minutes.

So, providing you have web access, you can provide reading lists or information feed lists more or less at the drop of a hat and without involvement of technical staff or consuming computer resources.

From a standing start last June, Grazr has made some amazing progress. Earlier this month it received $1.5M in series A funding and welcomed Dan Bricklin (programmer of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc) onto the board. It also developed a simple scripting language with which you can embed extra elements, such as searches, right inside Grazr and now it has incorporated the JavaScript programming language. These last two developments are in the public beta release. Here's a simple example which searches Google blogs: