I knew this day would come, but I've been trying to avoid it. For roughly a year now, I've been happily reading various news source by using RSS aggregators of various form and function. Some were desktop apps and others were server-side. Some for Windows, some for Linux, and some for OS X.

In recent months, there's been growing talk about RSS at work. And I don't mean things like the Finance, Ask, or Buzz RSS stuff. There's been talk of using it internally. We have a growing number of internal weblogs (or people looking to experiment with them) and some in-house tools that now generate RSS.

This is great.

But it's going to suck too.

The honeymoon is over. Now I need to have two aggregators: one at home and one at work.

I'm used to doing this for e-mail, but that doesn't mean I like it. I suppose I could start taking my laptop to work every day, but then I'd have to take my laptop to work everyday.

I've been thinking about this for a while and haven't come up with any good solution. I suppose that someone could work on synchronizing aggregators. Then I could sync up my home and work aggregators somehow. Maybe that'll happen?

I wonder if is going to become a more common problem as RSS picks up steam in various companies.

Posted by jzawodn at June 10, 2003 07:47 PM

Reader Comments
# Brent Simmons said:

Synchronizing between aggregators is going to be at the top of my list in a few weeks. (Immediately after the release of NetNewsWire I'm currently working on.)

My plan is to work with other aggregator developers so that synching can happen between different aggregators. This should be an open thing.

on June 10, 2003 08:01 PM
# brent ashley said:

I use my aggregator from two different home machines, my laptop, and up to four different client offices, spanning three different operating systems. I pretty well have to have a browser based interface. I tried Amphetadesk but its page size got unwieldy fast and I was just too used to Radio Userland's dismiss-it-once-read functionality to lose it. I sorta liked KDE's knewsticker but it suffered from sync issues of course as well as being platform specific.

I ended up running Radio Userland on Linux under stock win-free Wine on my home server, connected via cable modem and dynamic dns (zoneedit/perl script) and browsing into it from wherever I'm at.

I still use Movable Type for blogging, Radio just for aggregation.

on June 10, 2003 08:26 PM
# Jake said:

ah, so you need an aggregator aggregator?

on June 10, 2003 08:26 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Yes I do. :-(

on June 10, 2003 09:03 PM
# kellan said:

What I want is a server based aggregator that exposes an API to multiple clients, some on the desktop, and some web-based. (was chatting with the author of FoF[1] about this just last night) This is sort of setup I have now for email, where I can access my IMAP server via webmail, pine, or a gui.

I think as people become more mobile, but until we have ubiquitous connectivity, its a model that makes a lot of sense.

1. http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/

on June 11, 2003 04:36 AM
# Jake said:

re: my aggregator aggregator comment. There's actually a subtext there. I'm reminded of the waning days of the bubble when there were actually incubator incubators (remember those?) That portended the beginning of the end of the speculative IT boom. I hope this isn't a similar critical point for RSS. Heh, to think I remember RSS back in the good old days of my.netscape (before NS canned the service)

on June 11, 2003 07:32 AM
# Bob Lee said:

I may have a solution: http://crazybob.org/roller/page/crazybob/20030611#jeremy_wants_to_sync_up. (Sorry, couldn't get Roler's trackbacks to work.)

on June 11, 2003 08:07 AM
# Micah Alpern said:

For users of aggreators that just show posts chronologically without a read/non-read status (eg. Radio) all that's really needed is a way to synchronize a central OPML Subscriptions file, althoiugh it would still be helpful to have seperate folders for internal and external feeds.

on June 11, 2003 11:24 AM
# Sharper said:

The O'Reilly book on RSS is small, but pretty decent for background.

(See the RSS review for more details.)

Gotta love the flexibility of SMGL and XML, though!

on June 11, 2003 01:41 PM
# Robert Spychala said:

I think NewsGator already does this. Because it is an Outlook COM Addin it saves everything in your Exchange Mailbox space (if applicable.) So it should be portable like that. NewsGator is cool - just wish it wasn't a .NET app - kinda slow at times.

on June 12, 2003 07:30 AM
# Greg Reinacker said:

We're working on a lightweight synchronization solution for NewsGator that won't require Exchange Server. No ETA on that yet, though.

on June 13, 2003 08:20 AM
# Greg Reinacker said:

Robert - can you send us a note at support@newsgator.com, so we can talk about why NewsGator might be running slow for you? Other than a slightly longer than usual startup time, you shouldn't even notice it running.

on June 13, 2003 08:27 AM
# nik said:

I use rss2email and read my email on an IMAP server. I can also easily forward interesting news to friends. Just perfekt.

on June 14, 2003 04:02 PM
# Mikel Maron said:

Try feedonfeeds -- it's very nice personal server side rss aggregator. brainoff.com/fof is open for public perusal.

2nd kellan's comment - that's a good idea

on June 20, 2003 09:30 AM
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