lucis

News aggregators

For the past few weeks I have been looking for a good RSS aggregator. This gives pretty good list of the popular ones. Having tried some of the fancy ones, I was very disappointed. Most used Internet Explorer, or Outlook Express, or MS .NET. Having avoided MS internet products all these years, I was not going to start now. Besides, there is no way I would change my default browser/mailer, and using a two browsers would be clumsy and awkward. This rules out options like News Gator, SharpReader and FeedDaemon. Since I do not use Apple (too expensive for me!), NetNewsWire was also out.

One other requriement I have is the ability to seamlessly synchronize everything on atleast two different computers. (Ideally, I would also like synchronization to a handheld/cell phone, but I doubt there is any single solution that would do that.) So I tried some of the online aggregators like NewsIsFree, Feedster, and Fyuze. All were slow, clumsy and somewhat limited.

Then I tried AmphetaDesk. This is somewhat better than the others. Cross platform, relatively easy to use. But I found no easy way of syncing stuff across computers. Since it has a client-server model, I tried running it on a remote server, but the perl dependencies killed it :(. Maybe I'll try this one again later.

Then I tried NewsMonster. My biggest problem - its in Java. This increases the startup time of Firebird, and I really like to have a lean browser.

phew... I was about to give up. Then I find an entry in my Recent referrals that appears to come from someone using Feed on Feeds. I decided to give it a shot, and boy, am I impressed! This is probably one of the simplest aggregators. And also the best (imho). Takes 5 minutes to setup on a server with MySQL and PHP. Has a nice bookmarklet that lets me subscribe to sites. Supports atom. Since it runs on a remote server, I can access my news anywhere and not bother about syncing! Everything I was looking for, well almost. It doesnt have categories. The UI isnt great. There are some bugs, and marking a feed as read is somewhat clumsy. But, what can I say. It is the best I've tried so far.

Then there is the bigger thing about news aggregators that I dont like. They all work only in one direction. I am yet to see anything that allows you to post comments without going to the actual website. Now that would be really cool. Some allow you to make an entry into your own blog, and send a trackback to the original story. But a simple "Post to MT" bookmarklet does that. RSS itself seems somewhat limited to me.

I have been thinking a lot about what the ideal community interface should be. How do blogs, News sites, discussion forums, emails etc. come together in one place.

But this material for another post. For now, I am happy to have found a news aggregator that I like, atleast for now.