Sunday, May 11, 2003
Aggregators Revisited
It seems everyone built an aggregator this year but none of them solve my problems.
My subscriptions are not portable. Sure almost every aggregator imports and exports OPML but none of them give me much control over the process. More importantly – they don't make it simple to use more than one aggregator because the exported data doesn't include important information like the priority of the feed and the time I last read the feed.
Aggregators don't help me prioritize the stuff I'm subscribed to. They don't let me manually set priorities for different feeds let alone help set them automatically. Most aggregators don't even let me sort the feeds I'm subscribed to.
Aggregators don't help me find stuff that I'm not subscribed to. Sam Ruby wrote Beyond Backlinks a year ago. I don't know of a single aggregator that does what he talked about.
So instead of working on interesting feature we have a lot of really smart people implementing the same stuff all over again. That predictably led to yet another round of "Let's fix RSS".
Oh well I guess it is time to get back to work...
10:27:26 PM
More TagSoup
This is why I proposed moving from escaped markup to XHTML for RSS. [Don Box's Spoutlet]
If you can get the MSHTML Editor in Internet Explorer to produce well formed XHTML you might be able to convince the community to use XHTML. But that doesn't seem likely.
The pragmatic solution is to use something like TagSoup to convert the encoded content to well formed Xml. The results aren't perfect but they are well formed.
Back in January Jeroen Frijters used IKVM to compile TagSoup into a .NET assembly. It works but I'd rather have an XmlTagSoupReader that fully embraces the .NET pull model. I've thought about starting such a project licensed under the Academic Free License. Anyone interested?
8:44:46 PM
