[thelist] Re: newsreaders and news aggregators

[Diane Soini]

On Saturday, September 25, 2004, at 01:37 AM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:

> Subject: RE: [thelist] Re: newsreaders and news aggregators
> Reply-To: "thelist at lists.evolt.org" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
>
>
> Unless your boss is a technophile who enjoys testing software 
> (unlikely),

Unfortunately, he is a technophile. In fact, he's the CTO (believe it 
or not.) And he loves testing things out.

> you're probably better off handing her/him the reader that you've 
> already
> tested. Your boss probably just wants something that works that s/he 
> doesn't
> have to think about.
>

At first he was using a Lotus Notes reader. Now he's using Feed Demon, 
which looks very nice, but for some reason was giving back results that 
indicated I published something new yesterday. But I published nothing 
at all yesterday, and this "new" item was very old.

I would love to find a reader that actually reads the publishDate field 
of the RSS XML. The publishDate of the "new" item yesterday was 
something like 2003. I think the most useful for our purposes would:
- use the publishDate field in RSS
- be of the kind that resembles an email client,
- allows you to open links in a new window if desired
- understands javascript
- pops up a little window when newly published stuff is found
- is free
- can authenticate itself if the XML is in a protected directory.

If you know of one that'll do all that and do it well, let me know!

Otherwise, for now, I'm left trying to convince the CTO that the 
weirdness he finds while testing these products are probably not caused 
by faulty RSS XML. How can you mess up XML that has only a handful of 
usable fields?

Thanks, anyway.