Blogging Roller

Initially I was using Roller's newsfeed aggregator to monitor what was going on in the blogs which I find interesting. Now I am finding more and more that I am going to a few blogs all of the time and then jumping to other blogs from their blog lists. I think this is partially because the Roller aggregator is not very good (all real-time, pain to add new feeds, etc.) [ Anthony Eden, Interesting...]

So true. I'm surprised you were able to endure the pain for so long. I would like to add better aggregation features to Roller and have been toying with the idea of adding a full featured aggregator. I'm not sure a full-featured aggregator belongs in Roller, maybe Rickard is right in saying that aggregation is a client side job. Here are the reasons that I think a server-side aggregator should be integrated into Roller:

• Many users will subscribe to the same news sources and so can share a cache of the newsfeed data.
• Having an integrated aggregator will allow us to add a "Post about this item" button to each news item thus making it easier to comment on the posts of others.
• Roller already allows you to display newsfeeds, via the macros.showNewsfeed() directive, on your blog and having the newsfeed data cached will make these directives perform a lot better

Here are a couple of reasons against including an aggregator in Roller:

• Will not scale. Running a multi-threaded scheduling engine in process with a Servlet Engine, Roller, etc, will be a big burly memory eating bear. And what if you want to distribute Roller accross multiple worker processes?
• Web UI is clumsy. Wouldn't you rather have a pretty little JFC, SWT, Thinlet, or dot-Net app running on your PC as your aggregator?
• Others disadvantages that I can't think of because I am biased towards the server-side?