Monday, July 01, 2002
Where are all of the Web Service providers?
Robert Scoble says:
Simon Fell's Blog Toaster is awesome. What a great way to use instant messaging.
I agree but I wish it could use .NET Alerts. Then I could control how I receive the alerts. I could tell it to send the alerts to my cell phone, or my inbox, or all of the above. I could set it up to only notify me when I’m online. Or to send the alerts to my cell phone when I’m offline. You get the idea.
Microsoft changed the pricing for .NET Alerts. Now you don’t need the initial $15,000 fee, just pay $0.075/user/month. I’d easily pay a dollar a month for such a service. Anyone want my money?
Bundle that service with something like Mark’s backlinks and you can have more of my money.
11:29:12 PM
Is it time to give Aggie another chance?
I became an Aggie user today. I tried Aggie before but I didn't start using it because it seemed like it just wasn't quite ready for prime time.
In the past I would start Aggie and enter the path to my Radio mySubscriptions.opml file. A few seconds after clicking "Go!" my browser would display an HTML version of all the RSS feeds I subscribe to.
And that was the problem. It showed ALL of the RSS feeds I subscribe to. There was no easy way to see which items were new. It was just one giant list of news items organized by site.
Today, after working on the Aggie source code for the last few days, I started playing with Aggie again. But this time I left it running. The second time I clicked the "Go!" button I noticed the new ETag support - it is working great. I also noticed the new "Diff support".
To test the "Diff support" I restarted Aggie and clicked "Go!". Bummer, it only remembers the last item for the current session. Oh well that is still better than nothing...
Then tonight I reread A short guide to the guts of Aggie. But this time I really read it. And that's when I learned why Aggie couldn't remember my last items. I was pointing it at my Radio mySubscriptions.opml file. But it can't edit Radio files because doing so might break Radio's aggregator. DOH!
I recreated my subscription list and now Aggie remembers the last item for each channel. It also remembers the last ETag for each feed. That is cool since I'm stuck with a 56k connection at home.
If you tried Aggie before RC3 but were under whelmed, give it another shot. And if you are a Radio user remember to create your list of subscriptions manually. It's a pain, but it is worth it.
10:43:18 PM
