RSS aggregator take 2

Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 09:52pm

Two weeks ago I declared that I had found the perfect (for me at least) RSS aggregator. I was wrong.

After a few days of using reddit I found that I was reading the same headlines over and over as there was no indication of which ones I had seen before. My first thought was to go back and have another look at the aggregators that provide this functionality but then I thought about my inbox.

I currently run an IMAP server on my home linux server to access my mail which means that I can look at it from my desktop, my laptop, my work pc or even via a web interface and as soon as a message is read it is marked read everywhere. Since I check my mail on a regular basis anyway I realised that an RSS to email solution might be the answer and a quick google brought up rss2email. Fifteen minutes later I had it setup to check my list of feeds every four hours and email me any changes.

Every new item now appears as a separate message in my inbox with the summary from the feed (often the entire article which is the way I prefer it) as the message body. Now I can see which ones I hadn’t seen before (they are unread) and I can simply not delete the message if I want to follow up on it in some way later.

I have had this running for a few days now and as it is going well I have removed reddit from the folder of sites I regularly check. (I have a bookmarks folder in Firefox on my home desktop that I can simply middle-click on to load each site into a separate tab)

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