A Pocket PC News Aggregator Review
RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a Web syndication tool. It allows you to use a news aggregator program to scan RSS sites you subscribe to on a regular basis (say hourly) and get back just summaries of recently posted information with links to the full articles. This works great for blogs and other types of actively changing Web sites. This Web site supports RSS.
Let's say you have a favorite Web site (hopefully this one!) of which you enjoy reading just about every posting. Without RSS you would need to check the site manually a few times each day with your browser in order to enjoy the latest postings. Multiply this by a bunch of favorite sites and you've got quite a bit of browsing to do each day.
With RSS you can just subscribe to all your favorite sites using a news aggregator program. It will then automatically check all these sites once an hour and give you a summary of recent postings to them. These summaries will contain links to the complete postings so that if you see anything that looks interesting, it's only a single click away.
I’ve been able to find two RSS news aggregator programs for the Pocket PC: PocketFeed (freeware) and PocketRSS ($5.00). I use PocketFeed every morning on my Toshiba e740. I’ve had less success with PocketRSS. I simply can’t get it to download information for any of the sites I’ve subscribed to. I’ve sent Email to the developer and I’m awaiting his response.
A warning about PocketFeed: as its documentation states it’s alpha software. Since it was released about a year ago it’s very doubtful it’s going to be upgraded into a more stable product. I use it every day and so far the only problem I’ve had with it is the need to perform an occasional soft reset when it’s running. Nevertheless, make sure you’ve got your Pocket PC backed up before attempting to use this program. I back up mine every night, so when I use PocketFeed in the morning if something calamitous happened that caused a hard reset it would be very easy for me to do a restore. Be careful!
Both of these programs work very similarly. In order to use them at all, you need to have a list of RSS Web sites you’re subscribing to stored somewhere on the Internet in OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) format. If you use Radio Userland, like I do, as a news aggregator you’ll find an OPML file containing your subscribed sites at http://radio.weblogs.com/XXXXXXX/gems/mySubscriptions.opml, where XXXXXXX is your Radio Userland Id. If you don’t use Radio you can find a large list of RSS feeds that can be downloaded in OPML format at http://www.syndic8.com.
With PocketFeed, once you’ve downloaded the OPML file it’s a breeze to download RSS files. Just press the Download All button and all your sites will be downloaded very quickly. Of course you’ll need to have some kind of Internet connection to do this, but it can be as simple of the pass-through connection provided by ActiveSync. I use my e740’s WiFi connection to my home wireless router when using PocketFeed.
Below you’ll see an example of what appears on your Pocket PC after the Down All operation. It shows an RSS entry from the Pocket PC Thoughts Web site. The URL link shown (eWallet Upgraded to 3.1) is clickable, and will automatically launch your default browser to that Web page.
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