Nonsequittal Rumblings

I have experimented with several aggregators since yesterday’s post. So, what did I find out? I found out that I don’t like all of my candidates.

Opera

pro: displays HTML news contents, does not require .NET or JAVA

con: clunky UI, in-line image not supported

FeedReader

pro: displays full HTML news contents, does not require .NET or JAVA, fast

con: Relies on MSIE engine

RSSOwl

pro: Runs on Java technology, good UI

con: no support for HTML contents, default HTML viewer is MSIE for windows version

comment: The default browser for unix/linux version is Mozilla. I don’t understand why they couldn’t do the same with windows version

So, I searched for alternatives.

I thought about using XSL to display contents as HTML. But using this method lacks the support for old/new item flag, which I really like on all of the above mentioned programs.

Then I thought about writing my own RSS parser in PHP. It wouldn’t be too hard. It’s not the fastest solution, but handling XML in PHP was pretty easy when I’ve tried it out in the past. (It was just recently that I found the power of building OOP-based library for handling XML in PHP, without use of DOMXML. Maybe I’ll mention that some other day.)

I tried out MyYahoo‘s RSS aggregation service, since I already use MyYahoo. The result wasn’t too pleasing.

Besides, surfing through all those RSS news using those web interface would be a bit clunky. I wouldn’t like it too well anyway.

I tried out nntp//rss. It’s RSS to NNTP (usenet protocol) gateway, written in Java. The idea is close to those of YahooPOPS and HotPOP – the POP3 simulators for Yahoo Mail and HotMail. Except it can be configured to subscribe multiple feeds (they are not targeted for 1 news source, thank goodness!), and uses NNTP to communicate with the client, not POP3. I really like how it works. Now I can use Mozilla Thunderbird to view the RSS news.

And here’s one more thing: while I was searching for all these program,s I also stumbled upon quickSub – a small javascript library that makes subscription to the news feed easier for many RSS programs, including RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and, of course, nntp//rss. Now, it’s time to go add this library to Froth-Bite’s release page.