I’m looking for an RSS aggregator.
I’ve been using HotSheet recently, until I discovered it can’t handle Dive Into Mark‘s RSS 2.0 feed. (There’s no report when a feed fails to load–why have a log file if you’re not going to log to it?–so it took quite a while to determine where the problem lay.) Peerkat can’t handle 2.0 either; at least it reports the number of “bad” feeds, but it doesn’t give a reason–it’s wrong anyway, because if there’s any feed that’s going to be valid, it’s Mark’s. (I’ve also decided, based on the debugging experience I had with it, that I hate reading Python code.)
Amphetadesk does nice things, like conditional HTTP GET, but doesn’t do a lot of the nice things the others will, such as interleave items from different feeds, distinguish old items, limit their displayed length or allow them to be deleted. (Some of these are in the TODO list, but they’re not scheduled for a particular release. Speaking of which, there hasn’t been a release for several months now.)
Straw looks the most promising, but I haven’t upgraded to GNOME 2.0 yet so it’s out for now. Lots of Python, so again I won’t be much of a contributor. I do like that the release changelog is available in RSS (although HotSheet can’t handle RSS 0.94 either, so that feed goes into Amphetadesk too). The time to upgrade may be coming soon, and I will admit to having set a precedent–I replaced my DVD player because I couldn’t watch a certain movie.
There hasn’t been a release of AmphetaDesk for “several months now” since I only get to code on it for an hour or so a week. When in doubt, just check the amphetadesk-develop archives at http://www.sf.net/projects/amphetadesk/ – you’ll see regular progress reports there.
Thought I should follow up; after Morbus’ comments, I took another look at AmphetaDesk. I’ve since migrated almost all of my subscribed feeds to it.
One change I’ve made is to create a new skin that truncates posts in full-content feeds to show only excerpts; I use JavaScript and the HTML DOM to display the full post when I click the entry. I’m not entirely happy with how it works, else I’d contribute it back. (I’m also not on the mailing list, so someone else may have done a better implementation without my knowledge.)
Still haven’t used Straw, because I’m still not using GNOME 2.0.