Meta Posting
Friday, September 5, 2003
I guess this should be considered a meta posting since I'm going to write about blogs rather than Lisp. Until a few months ago, I only accessed blogs with a browser. I went to a blog, quickly checked the latest article to see whether anything new had been posted, and then moved on to the next blog. I quickly decided that this was inefficient as I was wasting too much time just checking to see if anything had changed on the blogs that I wanted to follow. Also, once I got past a certain threshold of blogs, it was just a waste of my time.
I then wrote my own quick-and-dirty aggregator (although I didn't know that "aggregator" was the name for what I wrote :-) at the time). It was IE and MSXML version-specific since it used MSXML to transform my xml-defined list of blogs (with & without RSS feeds) with a custom XSL stylesheet. This helped a lot as it allowed me to quickly scan topics to see which links I hadn't clicked on.
I then discovered that there were special-purpose news aggregators available. I did a search on the Web and thought that AmphetaDesk seemed to have a lot of positive reviews. I downloaded it and found that it was much better than my quick-and-dirty aggregator. After some experimentation, I added AmphetaOutlines, a drop-in template package for AmphetaDesk that uses the outline metaphor to show/hide articles. This is where I'm currently at and I find it a very efficient way to keep track of the blogs that I want to follow. I'd be interested in hearing from others on what alternatives they've tried and how they rate them.
