My RSS newsreader of choice is something called feed on feeds (FoF), which is a light weight server-side aggregator with easily customized CSS. It’s certainly not for everyone — you have to have a unix-based server, it helps to be a bit of a control freak, and you absolutely have to hate glitz — but I really like it.
FoF was built to read RSS 1.0, then tweaked to read Atom feeds too. And it does that pretty well. But I have run into one bug I don’t know how to fix. RSS 1.0 reports the name of the author of a post in a field called “dc:creator”; FoF expects that and knows how to display it. But Atom puts the author inside nested “author” and “name” tags — and FOF just seems to ignore those. That makes it hard to read the increasing number of group blogs which only offer an Atom feed since you don’t know who the author is.
I’ve found the place in the FoF code where the interpretation of the dc:creator tag happens, but it seems linked to building and reading MySQL tables, and since I don’t speak MySQL, I know better than to play with that. I tried emailing the author of the FOF, but no reply. He’s commented on this blog in the past, perhaps because he has some sort of search going looking for mentions of feed on feeds, so that’s why I’m posting this here.
Hey Steve Minutillo, you still out there? Please?
