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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, October 14, 2002I registered Newz Crawler tonight. They don't have automatic fulfillment. I tend to buy software on impulse, be it $25 for a minor shareware program or $300 for something serious like VMware. Instant gratification is important with impulse buys. I'm not feeling gratified right now, but I'll get over it when my activation code arrives.
Mostly I am registering now because I've past the one-week limit for storing news items. The registered version makes this configurable, based on days or items, and it can be set to keep items forever. Old items being purged doesn't really bother me, but Newz Crawler then picks up the purged items as new on the next scan. Worse, for feeds that don't date individual items (ie: RSS 0.9x feeds), the "new" old items get stamped with the current date.
The past few days have had me reading a bunch of old news items.
Newz Crawler also provides inaccurate counts of unread items. Sometimes it will show X items as unread in the channel listing, but viewing the channel shows fewer unread items or none at all.
My ideal aggregator would go to great lengths to protect me from ever seeing an item twice, including updated items (perhaps offering a method of "weighing" the significance of an update and offering a configurable threshold for flagging it as unread).
I'd also like better ways of managing items that I want to follow-up on. The "Favorites" folder is inadequate, too much mouse-ing and no sub-folders. Newz Crawler offers a way to "Flag" items, but there doesn't seem to be any way to view flagged items across channels.
So even tho I just paid for Newz Crawler, and previously purchased Radio primarily for it's aggregator, there is still room to sell me a better aggregator. I will probably write my own eventually, I feel the need to integrate aggregation with a larger project that I'll be starting soon... but it will be quite a while before that reaches fruition.
