Rodent Regatta

NEWS AGGREGATORS PART 3

Kevin Hemenway has asked me to explain and/or substantiate some things I said about Amphetadesk. He did so in a very business-like way, and I appreciate that. You’ll find his comments here.

I’ll take them in order…

1. Poor performance – I like to keep an aggregator running and check on updated sites over the course of several hours at the computer. I noticed that Amphetadesk would sometimes slow to a crawl or stop completely. Kevin’s mention of a memory leak problem in 32-bit Windows may indeed solve such a problem.
2. Difficult organization – My use of an RSS feed aggregator is most effective when I can order or prioritize stories around writers, subjects or threads. Apparently, there is a whole host of third party hacking that has been done to enhance Amphetadesk. Kevin suggests a Google search to locate such items.
3. Limited improvements – Kevin’s a busy guy and he explains some of the things that keep him busy.

My bottom line is I want an aggregator that meets my needs off-the-shelf. I’m ”hacking around” enough to make blogrolls and weblogs and blogshares and other stuff work. I don’t know whether Microsoft has a memory leak problem with Windows XP with all of the service packs and updates installed or not. Even if that problem is solved, I’m left to ”hack around” some more to turn Amphetadesk into the tool that I need it to be.

Kevin’s done a good job with it. Many people use it and speak highly of it. My remarks had and have more to do with the tool I need now than the tool I might be able to construct with a lot more work.

Here’s Part 1 of this saga and here’s Part 2.