I would really love someone to build a better news aggregator. If I weren’t already up to my eyeballs in projects, I’d do it myself. I no longer use Radio for my blog, because it’s a memory leaking, bloated application that slowly brings most systems to a halt. I just got tired of rebooting. However, the news aggregator feature is just about perfect. It can run as a web accessible service, so I can access it from anywhere, and on any machine, and it keeps track of things I’ve read. These are two features I’ve grown to love, and that aren’t included in most other news aggregators.

After bouncing some ideas off Ken, he had another great suggestion, along the lines of GMail… why throw out RSS articles at all? Hard drive space is cheap, it would be cool to archive them, and make them searchable. Here’s my dream news reader:

– Cross Platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
– Accessible via the web (password protected, of course)
– Keeps all articles grouped by site, and ordered by date/time
– Tracks “read” articles and doesn’t display them after they are deleted/archived
– Archives “read” posts, for searching later
– Supports RSS (.9x, 1.0, 2.0) and ATOM

I would pay for that news aggregator… I really would, and I think others would too.

Update:

Kleio pointed me to an new service called Bloglines which is an on-line news reader, and has many of the features I was asking for… I’ve signed up for an account, and I’m going to be giving it a try this week. I hope it’s cool!

Anyone who works with the web will most likely know the name Jakob Nielsen. He is the defacto usability guru for the web, and on his site useit.com he spouts off advise about making the web more usable. Ironically (apparantly, irony is not Jakob’s strong suit) useit.com is one of the ugliest, most un-user friendly sites in the history of the web.
Enter Design Eye for the Usability Guy… five designers offer some tips for how Jakob can make his site less of an eyesore, which is long overdue, and preserve usability ala his rules. Thank god… maybe more people would care about usability and follow Nielsen’s guidelines, if it weren’t so damn painful to read them in the first place!

Recently, Ernie the Attorney disabled comments from his blog. Fortunately, I don’t have a visible enough profile to make comment spam a problem. But I did do some digging for possible solutions.

The easiest option (and one that many people take) is to simply disable comments entirely. Personally, I think that is a bit drastic. It kills one of the very features that attracts me to blogs in the first place: exchanging ideas. And even that is not foolproof… if you’re using MT, you’ll still need to disable the scripts that allow comment posting, or you could still be victimized.

A nicer, more community friendly solution (I think) is to require registration before posting comments. I don’t think this discourages legitimate posters, but it certainly stops spam bots.

There are also some creative/scripted options out there. Check these links for more info:

• Jay Allen has the MT-Blacklist for MT users.
• Dive into Mark has some thoughts on ridding spam, and many links to some practical solutions.
• James Seng also has an MT-plugin to help stop spam.

Of course, nothing is fool-proof. But short of approving every comment post (who has that kind of time?!) or disabling comments altogether, registration seems like the best option to me.