Let me state for the record that I am not now, nor have I ever been, the author of a desktop news aggregator. And I never will be. I have a custom-built solution which uses my ultra-liberal RSS parser to rip, mix, and burn news that I care about, output it in a plain-text format which I hand-programmed, send it to a mail account of my choice, according to a schedule of my choice. I have privately used my ultra-liberal feed locator to find Joel Spolsky’s RSS feed and other feeds which I was unable to find in any other manner. The whole contraption works for me
and I have no plans to expand it to an end-user product. The code that holds this contraption together is not currently available, due mainly to its hideousness rather than any sense of propriety or protection.
However, Abe Fettig may be using my feed locator in his Hep project, and Juri Pakaste may use it in his Straw project, so the code will not go to waste. And hopefully the ideas (if not the implementation) will find their way into other news aggregators. If they do, I certainly hope the software vendors will be big enough to acknowledge that these innovations came from an open source project.
Readers intrigued by all this talk of RSS and looking to try a news aggregator should consider the following products:
- Amphetadesk, which I have used on Windows but which also runs on Mac OS X.
- Aggie, which I have used on Windows and which requires the .NET framework (a 20 MB download).
- NetNewsWire Lite, which I have used on Mac OS X.
- Straw, which I have been meaning to try under Linux.
All of these are under active development, all are freely available, and all of them except NetNewsWire Lite are open source. As I mentioned before, I do not use any of them on a regular basis, in favor of my own email-based solution. If these don’t satisfy you, there are many other news aggregators to choose from.
Those wishing to discuss news aggregators as a category should head over to the newly-formed aggregators mailing list, which, after some initial hiccups, is turning into a useful and productive environment to discuss issues facing developers of aggregator software and services.
