Well, this flies in the face of what Joel has been saying, but I have added a RSS feed for the NewsGator forums. The feed contains the 20 most recent posts.

I’m not sure this would work well for extremely high-traffic forums, but for the current volume in the NewsGator forums, I think it works pretty well.  At very least it’s handy for me, so I can easily be notified when there’s a new post there.

The forums are using the ASP.NET forums code; if anyone else is using this code, and wants to generate a RSS feed from them, let me know and I’ll be happy to send you the code.

Well, my 6-week (!) trial of the most excellent Virtual PC from Connectix has finally run out. This product has been instrumental in my everyday life since I first tried it, mostly for testing NewsGator on multiple OS’s, configurations, and Outlook versions. I’ve got 5 or 6 images that I use regularly, and 5 or 6 more that I test on before shipping a release.

It’s $229 to purchase, which I don’t have a problem with. My question is, is there anything cool in VMWare that I’m missing? VPC seems to be working fine, albeit hanging my machine every now and then. I could try out VMWare, but it’s going to be a huge investment in time to build the images I need. So basically, VMWare is going to have to do something much better or faster than VPC for it to be worth it to spend the time to switch.

What kills me is this thing is probably going to ship in MSDN in a few months, so I will have paid for it twice. But on the other hand, I can’t wait a couple of months. Heh.

Comments, anyone? Is VMWare cool enough to switch?

ScottW says:

I am going to release an optional “short-description” feature tonight that I hope everyone will use for posts longer than a sentence or two. (instead of the full post text appearing in the feed, only the short-description will appear)

While I understand Scott’s motivation (he needs traffic on his site to support revenue generation), I am in complete agreement with Brad, Brian, and others – don’t do this and take away the utility of aggregators for everyone. The news aggregator is what makes it possible for me to read so many people’s writing; without it, I’d only be able to read a few.

A possible compromise, I suppose, would be to expose both types of feeds – full descriptions, and excerpts, and let the feed consumer decide which feed he wants. Not sure it would help you, but people who have limited bandwidth might like it…

Wow, hard to believe…but today, my weblog has hit the right side of the top 100 list. Woo-hoo! I thought a celebratory post was in order. :-)

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… :-)

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?

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.

In an effort to deter unscrupulous hackers :-), I have modified the referrer log code to indicate which links either a) could not be followed, or b) could be followed but did not appear to link to the post in question.

At some point in the future I may remove the unverifiable links completely. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see referrers from news aggregators and the like. Anyone have any thoughts about this?