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<< Thursday, February 20, 2003 >> |
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There's more than one way to read RSS
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Joe Friend's NewsGator solution
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Joe Friend explains how to scan items efficiently with NewsGator:
There is a much better way to use it. Store all your newsfeeds in one folder and then use the "Group by..." feature to organize them by feed name. You can then navigate through all your feeds using the keyboard. Turning on the preview pane is best.
I had thought of that, but didn't find a feed name to group on. Greg Reinacker set me straight: it's a user-defined field, so you have to dig for it. View -> Current View -> Customize Current View -> Fields -> User Defined Fields -> .... hey, shouldn't there be an URL that gets you there?
This is excellent. Now that everything's in one folder, it can be set to view only unread messages, and I can step through them a keystroke at a time. Thanks, guys!
Meanwhile, several folks pointed me to nntp/rss, a Java-based lightweight NNTP server that can relay RSS feeds into an NNTP newsreader. And the docs hint at more:
Let's just say nntp//rss is great at letting you read RSS feeds through your newsreader, but NNTP is a two-way protocol. The next version of nntp//rss will begin to close the loop...
I haven't tried this yet, but being an old NNTP hand, I surely will. Lots of choices. I love open protocols!
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Trendspotting
It's just scary how measurable things are nowadays. Six months ago I ran some Google queries for "microsoft blogs" and "apple blogs" and "linux blogs" and blogged the results. Here is an update:
Update: Sean Trickerson wrote to say:
Your implication that there are massively more apple weblogs than microsoft weblogs is fundamentally flawed. Repeat your google search for "big apple blogs" I think you'll find that nearly all of your quoted statistics have no relation whatsoever to Apple the company.
Excellent point, Sean. I wish I could go back in time and change the September snapshot to be a search for "os x blogs" (currently: 10 Google results). Oh well. The point about MS blogs is, however, unaffected by that glitch.
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Greg Reinacker's NewsGator
Greg Reinacker's NewsGator is a fabulous hack: an Outlook plug-in (based on the .NET CLR, by the way) that reads RSS newsfeeds. It supports Outlook 2000 or 2002; I'm using 2000. I pointed it at my OPML subscriptions list and it scooped everything into a set of subfolders. Very NetNewsWire-like!
So am I an instant convert? Sadly no, for reasons that have to do with Outlook, not NewsGator. A minor issue is that in Outlook 2000, you can't suppress the To and From fields in the RSS subfolders. The showstopper, though, is Outlook's inexplicable lack of a "next unread" function. What's up with that? Various websites list the "top 10" Outlook keyboard shortcuts for things I do never or rarely, but there's nothing for the thing I do hundreds if not thousands of times a day.
When somebody comes up with the Mozilla mail/news version of NewsGator, I'll be on it in a flash.
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Scott Guthrie opens a window on ASP.NET
Scott Guthrie
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It's great to see that Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's ASP.NET lead, has popped up on the blog radar screen. Back in 2001, for Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast, Scott gave a fascinating and candid talk on the genesis of ASP.NET. Some interesting points from that talk:
- The IIS metabase was so detested that a FrontPage team convinced a Word team to have the spellchecker change "metabase" to "meta-abyss" :-)
- Despite early skepticism about the CLR and C#, the original ASP.NET subsystem wound up being 95% managed code.
- The original plan was to build an XSLT-based UI model, but it just didn't work out.
Scott's new blog strikes just the right tone. He points to relevant articles and code, spotlights members of his team, talks about internal testing procedures, and gives readers a sense of the rhythm of product development. Excellent start, Scott!
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