I think it's a great idea. I missed having a portal page that I could organize the news feeds. Most we're like stated above. You could add some things, but it was surrounded by curated junk and ads.

I really couldn't tell if it was backed by PHP or Ruby or Python by looking at URLs and source, but that doesn't matter as much as getting the content and community up and running. It's probably my bias, but /. submissions are palpably the worst they've been. I like the absence of javascript, but it's probably unavoidable once moderation is delivered. To me, |. is what the /. beta/re-write should have been as far as starting with a fresh slate, but needs submissions and commenting/moderation. Soylent news looks like it's taken slashcode, but seems to have decent submissions.