Today I received the latest DNJ newsletter for the third time... Never mind. I don't consider it spam at all :> I really do like the way the dnj site has changed and how lively it has become. But I allso do see how it is eating Donny and Doug. I would like to see more new articles appearing, have a submission floating around over there as well and am working on another one. I know the stack of material is is getting big. Any sponsors out there who can help getting them getting it on the site ? (just a suggestion)
Evaluating some news aggregators
Trying to streamline all info coming in I tried two news aggregators, RSS bandit and newsgator.
Bandit is freeware and still a little flaky. The largest problem is that it will occasionaly forget to save your news feeds. I had collected some interesting blogs but the next time I fired up bandit it had forgotten al of them. Which is a known bug according to the bandit forums (You can jump to them straight form the help) Giving it another chance I tried to reproduce the problem, this time all worked fine. Bandit does include (tabbed !) browser windows. Very nice but the things I miss are my favourites, so I end up opening a separate IE to find my favourite sites, copy the URL to bandit and have Bandit find the RSS feeds. Another thing not working in Bandit yet are the Back/forward buttons of my mouse and keyboard. The Bandit forum does have a wish list :).
Newsgator is a commercial product. It sells for $29 but you can download a fully functional (14 day) trial. The nice thing about it is that it integrates in Outlook and that it allso understands nntp newsgroups. All news is now in an Outlook folder. It all looks very nice and very professional. It is supposed to hook into IE as well, in the context (right mouse button) menu should be a “discover Rss feeds on this page” item. This did not work for me, could be a rights problem. There is one thing I did not like about Newsgator. If I oversaw a setting please correct me, but I don't like the way it organises posts. In a nntp all post are listed in a “linear” list. Outlook express, which is my nntp newsreader, shows discussion in a tree-view. You can see which message was a response to what and how message threads evolve. In rss feeds this problem gets even worse. You won't see any responses to a post untill you actually link to the webpage itself.
Imho RSS bandit understands my basic idea behind news, posts and an evolving discussion on them, far better than Newsgator. So I'll accept the flakes, save myself a little money and use RSS Bandit.
Peter