I’ve been using many RSS readers in the last couple of years, from SharpReader to Abilon and also used Bloglines a while. All do their thing quite well. However, as I spend most of my day in the Notes client, I missed a Notes based RSS reader. I know of the existance of the madicon RSS Reader but again, that’s like a ’seperate’ RSS reader to me. Although it’s very functional and it looks great, the ‘user experience’ was not doing it for me. I want to have my RSS in my mail file. That’s where I put my stuff, that’s where I expect the latest news to pop-up.

I did a quick browse in Google, and within a few minutes I found a java library which allows me to parse and retrieve RSS feeds. The only thing left for me was the user interface. Did it, and I’m happy with it. It was -extremely- simple to implement. It now supports enclosures, categorized feeds, automatic scheduled retrieval, comments rss parsing, etc. It just works And because it all resides in my mail file, where ever I can access that one, I have my RSS posts. So in the client, on the web, just everywhere. This is what I like. This is what it should be.

I liked it that much that I even submitted a session proposal to IBM for Lotusphere 2006. We’ll see if they it also like it that much. I proposed to talk about using the java library in your own agent, how to do the back-end stuff, etc.. After an hour you will be able to build it yourself. It’s just a set of basic views, a few basic forms and 2 agents.