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News Aggregator of My Dreams

May 16th, 2003

I’m enjoying SharpReader as my aggregator. Sort of.
See, I’m a multi-computer guy. It informs everything about the way I compute. I dislike having my necessary information tied to one computer. (See all my rants about why I dislike the “desktop server” approach to weblog tools for more info.)
I’d like a news aggregator that gives me the option to publish/store my subscription list and appropriate metadata about the status (e.g. read/unread, etc.) of posts online. When I refresh the feeds, it grabs that subscription list from the online location, and uses it to refresh. That way if I add a feed while at work (on the aggregator on my office desktop), I don’t also have to add it at home (on either or both of the two computers there).
And while you’re at it, could you make my Mozilla bookmarks work exactly the same way? Oh, and why not just integrate the aggregator into Mozilla while we’re at it? Thanks!

Greg Syndication & Aggregation

  1. D’Arcy Norman
    May 16th, 2003 at 15:40 | #1
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    Assuming you’re running some flavour of *NIX, just have your home directory on a server somewhere… You’d have the same settings no matter where you log on.
    You’d probably want some kind of fallback, in case the connection went down (or you went on the road or something…)

  2. Greg
    May 16th, 2003 at 16:30 | #2
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    SharpReader is a .NET news aggregator, written in C# (pronounced C-sharp, hence SharpReader). So, nope, the assumption I’m on some flavor of Unix isn’t correct. :-/
    I don’t know that SharpReader stores its subscription info in a file (it exports/imports via an XML file, but that doesn’t keep things synchronized). But if it did, why not just have an option to set the location of that file, either to a local folder or to a URL? Added benefit — I could share my subscription list with other people.
    Since Mozilla bookmarks are just a specially formatted HTML file, and Mozilla already has an editing/publishing mechanism built in, it should be possible to host the bookmark.htm file someplace else other than the Mozilla profile directory on my local machine.
    Of course, all of it’s possible. As with any software feature, it’s a matter of getting it on the radar of someone who can code it. If I had a few years to spare, it would be interesting to learn to code…

  3. AsbjornM
    May 17th, 2003 at 06:22 | #3
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    I uses SharpReader at two computers, works okay, I only copies the subscriptions.xml between these two computers.. And no, my two computers are not on the same network. (Well, ok, they are, somewhat, via the internet).
    Copying this file I have my blogroll updated all the time, better than using export/import I think, But of course, the data is not synchronized, but that is another case.

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