hebig.org/blog
personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

I am very excited to see that NewsMonster finally is out as Beta 1 and now also has its own domain newsmonster.org. Will try it out as soon as possible and hope it finally works - earlier versions I tested did not really.

NewsMonster is a very ambitious project by the maker of peerfear.org that integrates feed reading into the Mozilla browser suite, making it even more complete.

"In one sense, NewsMonster is just an RSS aggregator. It allows the user to subscribe to RSS channels and keep track of recent news. NewsMonster also supports advanced aggregation functionality including the extraction of content for PDA support, a "sitefilter" for websites that don't support RSS [scraper], rich images on each channel including favicons, and many other features. All content generation within NewsMonster is provided via XSLT technology. This allows users and developers to modify the way their pages look, customize HTML output, and easily add support for the latest RSS changes and additional modules"

For now, it consists of two parts: a Mozilla component as frontend and a Java component doing the aggregation work itself. In Beta 2, this is to change: author Kevin Burton wants to fully integrate NewsMonster into Mozilla, just like Mail, News or Calendar, and build a three pane UI with native XUL elements - great!

Apart from the basic tasks of aggregating feeds in all flavours (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, most RSS 1.0 modules supported) and scraping sites, NewsMonster will come with a magnitude of features that will turn it into an "advanced weblog manager", including a reputation system, FOAF support, Semantic Web stuff and more. I am not sure if I need all this. But I want a (ultra-liberal) Feed Reader living inside Mozilla, and it looks like NewsMonster could be the solution of choice.