I was playing around with NewsMonster today, and in doing this, I stumbled upon an obvious difference between NewsGator and other aggregators. NewsGator creates an independent object in Outlook for each entry it gets off an RSS feed. The object (an Outlook post object) is no longer tied to the original RSS feed.
This struck me because people have talked in the past about objects “dropping off the RSS feed.” NewsGator has no concept of this, because once an object appears in a feed the first time, NewsGator spawns its own representation of it and doesn’t “need” the feed for anything anymore. So even after it drops off the feed, I still have the item in Outlook.
Do other aggregators work this way?
This is a very technical way of looking at this. I am less than happy with they way we treat items in NewsMonster. 1.3 will place them in a database (as in Reptile) and you can see the top N items and also work with the archive too and page through result sets.
This will also mean you will have a full-text index and search which will be pretty damn cool.
Kevin
Yes - when you use PopHeadlines items are stored the same way. As well as full text search you can let your email client auto archive, delete old items, or whatever you want. It's a really powerful way to work with RSS - a lot of work has already been put into email clients, and changing RSS items to emails is a great way to take advantage of it. http://www.graemef.com/popheadlines
