Keith Devens .com

Looking for a new aggregator

Since Syndirella has been pissing me off so much (I went looking to see what's going with Dmitry, and his site is down), I went looking to see if there were any aggregators that didn't suck. So, at Brilliant Corners I came across an aggregator named Awasu.

It kind of sucks too (it keeps popping up balloons in my task bar, even though I told it not to by default, but its OPML importer used all the default default settings), it doesn't do RSS auto-discovery, it doesn't support categories and there's no way for me to reorganize my feeds, and it doesn't allow me to mark all items as "read". However, it does have a neat plugin architecture that lets you define your own data sources in Java.

So, now the question is... which sucks less? Sigh.

Update: Well, Awasu sucks, so I kept looking. I came across this page listing a bunch of aggregators, and came across Beaver, which also sucks! Though, in its defense, it's only version 0.4.3, so hopefully it'll get better.

I also came across this RSS to e-mail gateway script, which I think is a great idea. There's an aggregator that works through NNTP, but I tried that and didn't like it.

I would really like to read my feeds through my e-mail program, but to do that effectively I'd have to be able to filter my feed items into separate folders based on the feed. Of course I could do that with a similar gateway script and setting up a filter for every single feed, but there's no way I'm doing that. If only my e-mail program had some kind of scriptable interface, but noooo.

Why does everything suck? That's it, I want a Mac, they have better software.

Permalink | 6 Comments | id 3696

23:36 (utc-5)
edited: 2003-04-03 00:33 (utc-5)

Comments

Awasu 1.0.2 sucks less than 1.0 :-) And 1.0.3 will be released mid-April.

Some of things fixed in 1.0.1 and 1.0.2:

- The balloons that keep appearing even though you disabled them are probably error notifications which are always shown. In 1.0.2, you can disable balloons completely.

- Using the default default settings when importing from OPML is a bug and was fixed in 1.0.1.

- Categories and management of channels will be in 1.0.3. I'm running with it now and it works really well.

- "Mark as read" and "Mark all as read" was implemented in 1.0.1.

- RSS auto-discovery is on the to-do list. It will be implemented but probably not right now.

Why does everything suck? Well, I'm giving Awasu away for free and I'm doing this in my spare time of which I only have a limited amount of. I do need to sleep at least a little bit. Awasu 1.0 was a little light on features but I could either have hung on to it for 12 months until it was perfect and kick-ass or release it as it was and accept feedback from users on what they wanted to see in it. In fact, I did a bit of both. IMHO, the first cut of Awasu was siginificantly better (i.e. more features and less buggy) than, say, Syndirella's first release.

So please be patient. If there are things you'd like to see in Awsau, let me know (http://www.awasu.com/forums) and I'll see what I can do. I've also noticed that Syndirella has gone a bit quiet but I can assure you that we're very serious about Awsau.

I think the reason that there aren't any solid RSS readers out there yet is that it's still a fairly new market, with most of the apps being written by folks who hold full-time jobs. I've yet to find one that really knocks my socks off either, but I'll give it a little time.

You might also try these out if you haven't:

http://www.newsmonster.org/ <- integrated into Mozilla

http://64.191.70.247/activenotes/ <- Newsroom (which I've yet to try)

And alot of folks like the reader/aggregator built into Radio Userland, but it's not free.

Good luck!

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Wednesday, April 2, 2003

Looking for a new aggregator

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