Still Dreaming of News Aggregators
Via Boing Boing, I discovered NewsMonster this morning.
NewsMonster is an RSS aggregator that is integrated into Mozilla. If you’re not using Mozilla . . . well, you should be. It’s way better than IE. (I’ve had to use IE this week for some browser-specific testing. First time I’ve touched it in months, and, man, I could just never go back to non-tabbed browsing again.)
Anyway, if, for some silly reason, you’re not using Mozilla, NewsMonster won’t be of any use to you.
NewsMonster is closer to the news aggregator of my dreams. Like SharpReader it allows me to group my feeds into folders . . . although, unlike SharpReader, it won’t provide an aggregated folder view :-( NewsMonster imports OPML, so I could just pull in my SharpReader subscriptions though importing apparently doesn’t automatically create the folder structure which sorta makes you wonder if they missed the point of OPML. This led me to discover NewsMonster’s managing of folders is much more cumbersome than SharpReader, e.g. no drag and drop, but that’s the price you pay for staying away from .NET. I’m willing to pay.
However, the integration with Mozilla rocks. And NewsMonster does a Blogdex-like analysis of my subscribed feeds to show me the most popular links among my subscriptions, which is immediately useful.
The killer feature, though, is only available in the NewsMonster Pro version ($29.95): an online profile manager that allows you to store your subscription feeds online and synchronize them among multiple installations.
Since I’m a multi-computer guy who works from two to three different boxes that live in different locations, this is key to the news aggregator of my dreams.
I’ll play with NewsMonster for a while, and if I like it as an aggregator, I think the online profile feature will be worth $30 bucks to me. Much more valuable than, for example, paying $40 for Radio Userland’s crappy aggregation and mediocre weblogging tools. Ugh.
Now if I could only get Mozblog to work. And has anybody made an MT plug-in to integrate the Mozilla WYSIWYG HTML editing widget in Movable Type?