{"id":142,"date":"2003-01-21T12:03:00","date_gmt":"2003-01-21T17:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/uncategorised\/0095.html"},"modified":"2006-10-15T19:22:06","modified_gmt":"2006-10-16T00:22:06","slug":"0095","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/computers\/0095.html","title":{"rendered":"Syndirella"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dive Into Mark: New news aggregator for Windows<\/a>. Following Mark’s lead, I started using Syndirella<\/a> for my news feeds. I was using AmphetaDesk<\/a> before, which was OK once I installed the outliner plugin<\/a> but it still wasn’t up to scratch.<\/p>\n

Among other things, AmphetaDesk lacked a liberal RSS parser, RSS auto-discovery and support for item-level dates, all of which can be found within Syndirella. Syndirella’s best feature, however, has to be the built-in scraper which allows you to syndicate sites which refuse to provide an RSS feed. I have successfully configured several HTML-only feeds for syndication in this manner.<\/p>\n

These features come at a price, however, as Syndirella requires the Microsoft .NET framework, a 20MB download. Still, even with its bugs it’s probably the best Windows-based news aggregator out there.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Morbus Iff, AmphetaDesk’s author, has gracefully addressed the above three feature points.<\/a> It seems as though many of my gripes are related to the outliner plugin and not necessarily AmphetaDesk itself, which is ironic since the outliner plugin made AmphetaDesk a much more enjoyable experience overall. Although AmphetaDesk supports auto-discovery, it does so through a bookmarklet<\/a> (essentially a “Subscribe” toolbar button) and not when entering a URL in the “Add a Channel” page. Syndirella makes no such distinction, and even invisibly searches Syndic8.com<\/a> for a feed when it cannot find one linked in the HTML, as per Mark Pilgrim’s RSS locator wishlist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even with Morbus’ helpful information, I’m still sticking with Syndirella for now<\/em>. Having an aggregator application in which I can easily navigate to new items (by pressing the spacebar) is so much faster than any browser-based alternative. This doesn’t apply solely to AmphetaDesk as I used Radio Userland’s aggregator for a month, and it was the same way. However, as I mentioned to Morbus over ICQ, AmphetaDesk was quite nice in combination with tabs and gestures in Mozilla.<\/p>\n

<\/ins><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dive Into Mark: New news aggregator for Windows<\/a>. Following Mark’s lead, I started using Syndirella<\/a> for my news feeds. I was using AmphetaDesk<\/a> before, which was OK once I installed the outliner plugin<\/a> but it still wasn’t up to scratch.<\/p>\n

Among other things, AmphetaDesk lacked a liberal RSS parser, RSS auto-discovery … Read more<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}