Harvester is fun. RssBandit is better. SharpReader Owns.
[Chris Hollander: Objective]

Everyone seems to agree with Chris. Me too. Wow, the threaded view is awesome. And it has filtering too, but not quite what I was looking for. Like Brad, I’d throw money at SharpReader. Looks like I’ll need to add support for the image RSS tag, since SharpReader will show it.

I posted yesterday about wanting a filtered version of aggregate RSS feeds. I take it back! I want my RSS news aggregator client to be filter enabled, not the service providing the aggregate feed. What was I thinking? Since I’ve signed up as a member of RSS Bandit (and just got accepted as a member of Harvester) I’ll look into adding the feature myself. Also, Sam Ruby pointed out Luke Hutteman’s SharpReader which looks like it allows you to view a post in context with other posts like a threaded conversation. Cool, I’ll have to check that out.

On an RSS related note, thanks Dare and Don for pointing out SgmlReader to me. I just built a simple utility to download my weblog DB into an XML file, including converting the HTML -> XHTML (though I still need to do some namespace conversion work). As such, I don’t see the need for my HtmlReader. However, I will be keeping the code around and will even be updating it soon with a bug fix from Chad Osgood.

I really like Jesse Ezell’s.net Weblog Archives (even though he didn’t spell my name right at first! 😄 Here’s my feature request: Filtering. I already subscribe to many of the currently archived feeds. I’d love to be able to filter those out of the RSS feed. Since RSS retrieval is a simple GET, the list of filtered feeds would need to be stored on the server side. Or you POST up the list of filtered feeds and get back the filtered aggregate RSS. Aggregating and archiving RSS seems to be hot right now, so a standard mechanism for filtering would be appreciated. My vote: lets expose a web service to retrieve aggregate RSS information.