Info feeds
Thanks to feedjack, I'm able to keep in sync with 120 feeds (many of them, like slashdot or reddit, being an aggregates as well), as of today. Quite a lot of stuff I couldn't even imagine handling a year ago, and a good aggregator definitely helps, keeping all the info just one click away.
And every workstation-based (desktop) aggregator I've seen is a fail:
- RSSOwl. Really nice interface and very powerful. That said, it eats more ram than a firefox!!! Hogs CPU till the whole system stutters, and eats more of it than every other app I use combined (yes, including firefox). Just keeping it in the background costs 20-30% of dualcore cpu. Changing "show new" to "show all" kills the system ;)
- liferea. Horribly slow, interface hangs on any action (like fetching feed "in the background"), hogs cpu just as RSSOwl and not quite as feature-packed.
- Claws-mail's RSSyl. Quite nice resource-wise and very responsive, unlike dedicated software (beats me why). Pity it's also very limited interface-wise and can't reliably keep track of many of feeds by itself, constantly loosing a few if closed non-properly (most likely it's a claws-mail fault, since it affects stuff like nntp as well).
- Emacs' gnus and newsticker. Good for a feed or two, epic fail in every way with more dozen of them.
- Various terminal-based readers. Simply intolerable.
Server-based aggregator on the other hand is a bliss - any hoards of stuff as
you want it, filtered, processed, categorized and re-exported to any format
(same rss, but not a hundred of them, for any other reader works as well) and
I don't give a damn about how many CPU-hours it spends doing so (yet it tend
to be very few, since processing and storage is done via production-grade
database and modules, not some crappy ad-hoc wheel re-invention).
And it's simple as a doorknob, so any extra functionality can be added with no
effort.
Maybe someday I'll get around to use something like Google Reader, but it's still one hell of a mess, and it's no worse than similar web-based services out there. So much for the cloud services. *sigh*