Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Gordon takes a look at a spam filtering plug-in, and goes on to talk about organizing feeds in NewsGator:

I’ve been thinking about trying to come up with a way to generalize the filtering, so that I could categorize good emails into separate folders, or categorize my incoming RSS feeds from NewsGator in interesting ways, rather than the default, which is to organize by feed. For example, I might categorize posts into Java, .NET, XML, etc, so I could read them together.

Actually, you can do this today. For example, you could send all of your .NET feeds into a folder called “.NET Feeds”, so they will all be together (NewsGator/Options, Subscriptions, select all the feeds you want, click Edit… and specify the folder).  Once you have news in the folder, you can add the “Feed Name” field (field is listed under user-defined fields), and you’ll be able to see at a glance which feed each message came from. Add the “Publish Date” field, and you’ll be able to sort all of the posts in this folder by the publish date/time.

There are so many possibilities for organizing data inside of Outlook…

There’s an interesting issue with using <guid> elements in RSS feeds. Presumably, the <guid> element in RSS is intended to uniquely identify a post, so that aggregators can tell whether or not they have already seen a post. The technorati feeds, for example, use this to their advantage. If you look at one of their feeds, every minute the actual text of the items is different (”updated n minutes ago” or something along those lines); but if you were to use the guid, you could tell that you’ve already read the post.

Here’s the kicker, though. Lots of people update a certain post throughout the day, adding corrections, updates, or whatever. When they do this, the guid typically does not change, but the content of the post does. If you already read the original post, there are two things the aggregator could do.

First, it could ignore the new, updated post, because you’ve already read a post with that guid. This is pretty unfortunate, though, in the case where the update contains critical information. In many of the weblogs I read, I’m very interested in the updates, and I like to see them.

Second, it could display the new post (so you don’t miss out on the new information). This is what NewsGator currently does. It looks at the title and description, and if something has changed, it will redisplay the post to ensure you don’t miss anything.

There are numerous problems with both approaches; but the technorati feeds just plain won’t work effectively unless you go with the first mechanism, which seems unfortunate.

What are your thoughts? How do you think the aggregator should work?

Due to a large number of requests, I have added a comments link to posts in NewsGator where the RSS 2.0 <comments> element is present. This will be in the next public build, scheduled for next week sometime.

Maybe Dave will add NewsGator to the RSS 2.0 aggregators list now… :-)

Sorry folks…I made a little mistake, and evidently didn’t test a couple of bug fixes against each other. With certain feeds, the old 0.8.4 (actually 0.8.4.1) would fail to retrieve, and the status window would just sit there and stare at you.

I built a new version, and the download links have been updated. If you have installed 0.8.4 already (there’s quite a few of you), check the version (Newsgator menu, About). If you are running 0.8.4.1, please go to the download site and install the updated one, which is 0.8.4.2.

Sorry about this…and thanks to Adam for pointing it out so quickly.

Well, there wasn’t going to be another release before 0.9, but there were enough changes piling up that I wanted to get them out for people to use. So, you can now download v0.8.4 from the NewsGator site.

Users who are using the public 0.7 or 0.8 builds can just install 0.8.4 over them. If you are using a private build that you obtained directly from me, you need to uninstall it before installing this new version.

Changes:

• NewsPage recent posts now link to the specific message instead of the entire folder
• NewsPage will now show posts in the base news folder
• Added refresh button to NewsPage
• Feeds now alphabetized when retrieving
• Subscription URL’s now displayed in edit dialog
• Added a “default location for new subscriptions”, which is also used by context menu
• Visual indication when articles are read from the NewsPage
• NewsPage performance improvement for those with lots of read messages in news folders. Performance when all messages are unread is comparable to previous version.
• Allow multi-select on feeds when editing folder names
• Separated online/offline settings with check news interval
• Fixed some NewsPage problems experienced by a few users
• Fixed problem where if NG was launched other than at startup time (such as selecting the Add-in from tools/options), it would not properly initialize, and could sometimes crash
• Fixed problem when there were no feeds in the list
• Fixed problem where NG would not retrieve news again after encountering a RSS feed without a title
• Double click on subscription list now opens subscription for editing
• Progress dialog now has minimum size
• Minor adjustments to improve GUI interaction when retrieving many new feeds at once