Organizing feeds

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…

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GUIDs and RSS

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?

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Colossal Screw-up

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.

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NewsGator 0.8.4

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

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Referrer abuse?

Many news aggregators (including NewsGator) write something interesting (to them!) into the HTTP referrer field when retrieving RSS feeds. For example, NewsGator writes http://www.rassoc.com/newsgator/ into this field. There have been some interesting posts about this recently, mostly saying that this is an inappropriate use of the referrer field, and that User-Agent is where the aggregator information should go (incidentally, NewsGator uses the User-Agent as well).

On the other hand, I’ve had some comments from folks who want to be able to customize the referrer field, presumably to point to their own site. This wouldn’t address the problem, and in fact might make it worse, by adding more “bogus” referrers.

What do you guys think? There is still time to address this for NewsGator v1. I’m leaning toward defaulting to no referrer, and allowing the user to override this with a custom referrer string. Another option is what Aggie does (or used to), where the referrer could be something like http://www.newsgator.com/referrers?usersite=www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/. Thoughts?

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Retrieving news

If you are having a problem where NewsGator seems to stop retrieving news, and the status dialog just shows “Retrieving…” for one or more of the feeds, read on. Each feed should time out within 60 seconds. If you are seeing a feed get “hung up” for more than a couple of minutes, and when you click Cancel All or Get News nothing happens, then please contact me.

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NewsGator and .NET installation

There have been problems with the NewsGator 0.8 installation where the .NET Framework would sometimes be downloaded and installed even if it was already present. There is now a new installer on the download site, which you can use if you already have the .NET Framework installed.

The problem seems to be in the detection code, which is of course under the complete control of my installer vendor. Hopefully we’ll be able to narrow this one down and get it fixed!

A big thanks to all who have been helping with this problem.

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Newsgator v0.8 Released!

Another huge release, this one pretty much feature complete for v1. You can read the release notes on the download site, but here’s a couple of things to wet your appetite:

  • Added “NewsPage” HTML view of news:

  • Added Internet Explorer context menu to right-click on RSS link and add to NewsGator:

  • Can now adjust retrieval performance vs. resources used; average retrieval performance now drastically faster:

  • Now supports using IE proxy settings, and proxy credentials
  • Added automatic .NET Framework installation to installer

And a whole host of other items as well. Go take a look!

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NewsGator 0.7

This is a huge milestone for NewsGator…it is getting fairly close to feature-complete for v1.

Here’s a rundown of what’s changed:

  • Posts without titles will now show an excerpt from the post instead of a blank title.
  • There is now a busy notification icon in the task bar when NewsGator is retrieving news.
  • New status dialog, which shows which feeds NewsGator has retrieved, which feeds had errors, and which ones are in process. Status dialog can be displayed from the NewsGator menu, or from the busy notification icon (double click or use context menu).
  • Retrieve news process can now be cancelled from the status dialog.
  • You can now select a folder name for each feed independently.
  • Added capability to import from OCS files, which allows importing NewzCrawler subscriptions.
  • Added capability to export a OPML subscription file.
  • New columns have been added in Outlook for feed name and publish date.  You can access them by looking at the list of user-defined fields in a folder containing news items.
  • Fixed problem that could occur when a feed was missing a title.
  • Cache directory has been moved to the intended location.
  • Fixed a problem when you added a feed while a news retrieval was in progress, and the new feed would disappear from the list.
  • Changed NewsGator menu shortcut so as not to conflict with “New” button on default toolbar.

Some of the new features, used together, enable some pretty cool things. Here’s an example of a single-folder view of news, but still separated by feed (click for larger version):

Version 0.7 is available for download here. Note that you must un-install previous versions before installing 0.7. You will not lose your subscriptions by doing this.

Also, I have gotten a LOT of questions about the future of NewsGator. Here’s the official word. NewsGator will become a commercial product as of version 1.0. Pricing has not yet been determined, and will be announced just prior to launch. Current builds will expire on Feb 28, 2003, and users will need to upgrade to a current version at that time.

As always, comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome!

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