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March 17, 2005

I Need a New Aggregator

An unfortunate thing happened to me this morning. I have an old evaluation of NetNewsWire installed alongside the free version of NetNewsWire Lite which I use(d) extensively on a daily basis. This morning, when using Quicksilver to open NetNewsWire Lite, I accidentally opened the old expired evaluation version of NetNewsWire. For some reason, it overwrote all my NetNewsWire Lite feeds with the default list of feeds that come with the application.

This is very much not a good thing. I'm sure I had well over 100 feeds pertaining to everything that interests me (mostly technology, but also some personal weblogs, watch weblogs, etc.). I have a backup from November that will allow me to recover many of my feeds, but my collection was constantly evolving and being refined, so the last four months of tweaks are gone.

Anyway, enough lamenting. I'm looking at this as an opportunity to start fresh with a new collection of feeds, new organization, and certainly a new aggregator. I really like(d) NetNewsWire, but I don't think I can bring myself to use it again. Additionally, I'm tired or waiting for the 2.0 version just to get Atom support (it's been in beta for a very very long time).

So my first question is what aggregators are Mac users out there using these days? I'm willing to go with either local or web-based. Once I settle on a new aggregator, I will then ask people to post some of their favorite blogs. I'm pretty sure I can have all my old feeds back with a couple of hours of searching and surfing, but I'd like to use this opportunity to find some new, more obscure feeds worth aggregating. That's a question for another time, though. First the aggregator.

Posted by cantrell at March 17, 2005 01:43 PM | References

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Well, on the Mac I'm currently using NewsMac by ThinkMac Software at http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/newsmac/index.html, and on the PC I'm using MM Central BlogReader (I think having the Pod Feature on it on)

Posted by: Jeff Stevens at March 17, 2005 02:11 PM

I've been using RSS Owl lately (on Windows, but it does have a Mac version). I ended up turning off the tabbed reading and tweaking a few other things, but I really like the results. You can find it here:
http://www.rssowl.org/

Posted by: Aaron Leavitt at March 17, 2005 02:12 PM

I'm not a Mac user, but since you asked about web-based aggregatores, I use Bloglines.

Posted by: Manish Jethani at March 17, 2005 02:30 PM

I had the same experience. I'm in the middle of writing my own so I don't have to deal with the hassle of keeping my OPML synched as well (I use XP at work and OS X at home, which makes that a real chore). You can keep up with my dev at http://www.naamannewbold.com/rss/. If you like what you see, let me know and I'll get you the source.

Posted by: Naaman at March 17, 2005 02:39 PM

Christian: On the Mac front, I've heard good things about Shrook.

http://www.fondantfancies.com/apps/shrook/

On the Web, I use JournURL. For example, this is where I came across your entry:

http://mxblogspace.journurl.com/?fa=skin.thread&group=23&date=feeds

Posted by: Roger Benningfield at March 17, 2005 04:12 PM

Christian,

For web-based aggregators, I have a php one based of feedonfeeds that you can see live at www.medlogs.com. Under the hood... it sucks. Thus, I also wrote the foundation for a CFC-based version as a sample app for a little framework I'm working on. I still need to round out its feature set to make it worthy of replacing medlogs, but you're welcome to do whatever you like with it... you can download it from http://cfopen.org/frs/download.php/68/coldspring-0.1.1.zip

-Dave Ross

Posted by: dave ross at March 17, 2005 04:32 PM

I really like "Bloglines" (www.bloglines.com) - nothing to install and available from any web browser.

Posted by: Peter Tilbrook at March 17, 2005 05:16 PM

I use SAGE - it's a firefox extension that works pretty well for my needs and saves me from having to have yet another app installed.

It adds a sidebar to firefox and creates a nicely styled view of the feed in the main window. you can also have it show you a list of the headlines below your feed list.

the only caveat is it doesn't do feed discovery on webpages so you have to find them manually then add a bookmark to that feed.

Posted by: Bill at March 17, 2005 06:09 PM

I have been using Thunderbird on my PC and MAC for RSS and News.

Posted by: George Ross at March 17, 2005 06:53 PM

I just use live bookmarks in firefox.

Posted by: Mike Rankin at March 17, 2005 09:07 PM

I had problems to display feeds on Thunderbird.
I suggest sharpReader on windows, a fast and stable news agregator. Cool features are opml export (for backuping your feeds url) and desktop alerts.
http://www.sharpreader.net/

Posted by: Sébastien Ballesté-Antich at March 18, 2005 04:41 AM

re: Bills comment SAGE

I use Sage for Firefix as well (which is great), but use the LiveLines extension to add live bookmarks straight to SAGE which is nice

https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows&numpg=50&id=324

Posted by: uncle.wilco at March 18, 2005 07:32 AM

I'm using the NNW2.0 beta commercial version and I love it. I don't have a problem with it being in beta...

Posted by: Sean Corfield at March 18, 2005 10:29 AM

I use NewsFire (newsfirerss.com) and I've had no problems with it.

Posted by: Cody at March 18, 2005 01:54 PM

Hi, I've been working on a simple RSS reader/email/calendar/all-in-one web tool. It first started out as a pet project to show the power of CF and just kept growing.

You can check out a (pre beta) demo at:

http://webauthor.com/products/dashboardxm/demo.htm

Posted by: Mario Rodrigues at March 21, 2005 04:08 PM

For web-based aggregators, I have a php one based of feedonfeeds that you can see live at www.medlogs.com. Under the hood... it sucks. Thus, I also wrote the foundation for a CFC-based version as a sample app for a little framework I'm working on. I still need to round out its feature set to make it worthy of replacing medlogs, but you're welcome to do whatever you like with it... you can download it from http://cfopen.org/frs/download.php/68/coldspring-0.1.1.zip

Posted by: Sindy at January 23, 2006 12:26 AM