SharpReader.
Brad '.Net Guy' Wilson: Oh, and isn't it interesting that the first wave of .NET rich client apps that we've seen have all been blazingly fast and look appropriate for the environment... that definitely has never been true of Java, even today 8 years after release. Microsoft has a real advantage here that they need to leverage, by encouraging people to get away from awful web UIs and get back to rich client/server UIs.
Ouch! Brad is talking about <a href= "http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2003/04/06.html#000056">SharpReader, a new .Net based three-paned RSS aggregator. I'm downloading it now. The related posts feature looks really cool.
Update: OK, I'm sold. SharpReader is awesome. It has really leap-frogged Synderella.
Update: it does not seem to detect updated posts like Synderella and Aggie do.
Details on the FreeRoller 'feeds always appear updated' bug.
The problem was that FreeRoller has two DNS names 'freeroller.net' and 'roller.anthonyeden.com' and Roller uses the Servlet API request.getRequestURL() method to determine the URLs for RSS feed permalinks. Normally, this would not be a problem. You enter the freeroller.net address in your aggregator and you always get permalinks the to freeroller.net domain.
After Roller started caching RSS feeds, this became a problem. Sometimes RSS feeds would be cached with the freeroller.net address and sometimes they would be cached with the roller.anthonyeden.com address. If your aggregator recieved a copy of a feed at 1PM with the freeroller.net address and the same unchanged feed at 2PM with the roller.anthonyeden.com address, it would be fooled into thinking that every news item in the feed had been updated because the permalinks are different.
I fixed this by changing Roller so that it determines it's base URL only once and then stores this URL in the ServletContext as an attribute. There is still a risk that when Roller is restarted, feeds will appear to have been updated depending on whether the first request is for freeroller.net or roller.anthonyeden.com. Anybody have a better solution?
Bryan Field-Elliot suggests adding a configuration parameter so that a Roller admin can specify the 'base URL for RSS permalinks'. Sounds good to me.