In no particular order:

• Things are progressing well with Bloglines. I fixed up the subscription process today and squashed some more bugs. Next up is fixing the Manage Subscriptions screen, adding search, and adding a way for people to make their subscription list publically viewable.
• Bloglines handles the new AOL Journals feeds fine.
• My Bloglines subscriptions now number about 90.
• I wonder if I should try to pick a fight with one of the “A-list” bloggers in order to get publicity for Bloglines. Maybe add a feature that would display diffs of updated entries.
• I started setting up Moveable Type for this blog, but didn’t feel like mucking with Apache config stuff tonight.
• Apache 2.0 has problems, best I can tell. If your scripts output “too much” to stderr, they freeze. That sucks, and hampers debugging.
• All my production machines run Apache 1.3, and I see no reason to change.
• Feedster is no longer crawling Bloglines every half an hour. I talked with Scott and now they pull the list of new feeds once a night.
• I’m learning to fly in a little Citabria taildragger. Been taking lessons for about a month and a half. I can now take off and land with a little bit of proficiency (enough to live through the experience, but not enough for me to be happy with my skill level). Now that the crushing fear has subsided, flying is getting to be really fun.

Bloglines in DayPop’s Top 40 See here That’s fantastic! So far, the reaction to Bloglines has been uniformly positive. People like having an aggregator that they can access without having to download and install software, and that can be accessed from multiple machines. I continue to make improvements to the system, based on user suggestions. Expect to this week see search and a few other goodies.

News Aggregators In Email Clients Some people are using news aggregators that allow RSS feeds to be inserted/delivered along with their normal email. They say they like this integration, but I don’t get it. My email inbox is so busy as it is, mainly with spam (that I’m trying to stop), that I really don’t want more things to show up there. Just like I don’t read USENET in my inbox, I want to keep news feeds in a seperate application (like Bloglines ;-) ).

Bloglines Last night I launched Bloglines. Bloglines is a server-based news aggregator. With it, you can subscribe to your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. It will then track changes to those sites, making it easy for you to keep up to date with the blogs you read. There are many client-based news aggregators, but none worked for me. I use multiple machines and multiple operating systems, so a server-based solution made the most sense to me. There are many other advantages to using a service instead of downloading a program. Anyways, the service just launched, so it’s still really rough. I am now beginning the post-launch refinements.

I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs. I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work. What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days). Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.