I've been playing with blog tools and desktop news aggregators lately, so I thought I'd post some short summaries of what I've seen and what I've run into as problems.

Discussed: Peerkat, Blosxom, Amphetadesk.

First, Peerkat. O'Reilly's Rael Dornfest offers Peerkat as an alternative to ORA's Meerkat service. (Meerkat is their high-end news aggregator, which collects tech-friendly news stories.) Peerkat's aims are different - the intent is to let you select news sources that you're somewhat interested in, periodically download new headlines, and then scan through the generated list of links for things that you're really interested in. Where Meerkat is intended to run as a community service, Peerkat is a lower-performance, single-user aggregator.

Pros: Peerkat was easy to install (less than two minutes, for me), didn't require any real setup, and seemed to be well-documented.

Cons: I couldn't get Peerkat to download some of the headline sources that I tried to feed it. Most notably, I couldn't get headlines from either Slashdot or Kairosnews. This was a Real Problem For Me.

Next, Blosxom (which I typically mis-spell as Bloxsom): Bloxsom is uber-simple. You write your blog posts as text files. When Blosxom is run (the program is a perl CGI), it merely slurps your blog posts from the text files into your Blosxom template. Not very complicated, and not hard to install. 5 minutes? Something like that.

Pros: Simplicity, ease of use, does-not-require-html-knowledge-to-work. Bulletproof, too- doesn't need anything other than a working Web server and a Perl installation.

Cons: Might even be a little TOO simple. Great for geeks and unix propellerheads (me), but not nearly as nice for people who aren't comfortable with "bare bones" software. All the "real work" goes on in your editor of choice, rather than in some sort of Web-based writing environment. If you're OK with that, Blosxom might be just the ticket.

Mini-review number three: Amphetadesk.

I love this piece of software. Or, rather, I love what it does. I'd been resisting trying it for about six months - something I regret now. Like Peerkat, Amphetadesk is a personal aggregator. It only has one purpose - to download news headlines and stick them on a Web page so that you can read them. It does this rather well ;)

One of the frustrations I had with Peerkat didn't come up with Amphetadesk. I was able to read Slashdot and Kairosnews headlines without any real problems. [Amphetadesk seems to handle the various formats for headline syndication a little more smoothly - where Peerkat choked on a few formats that it simply didn't understand, sites that Amphetadesk didn't grok were far more unusual. There are at least five common formats out there (RSS in multiple flavors, RDF, various other XML-based schemes) ] Adding other sites was easy, too. Amphetadesk even provided a large alpha-sorted list of headlines for me to choose from - I spent a couple of hours going through and subscribing to the headline feeds from sites and blogs that I only rarely visit. Now that I can just glance at the syndicated headlines, I don't need to go to the sites to see if there have been new postings. This has been a timesaver for me, the Web addict. Several hours of wasted time have now been condensed into 10-15 minutes of quick browsing.

Pros: Easy to set up. My Linux machine already had all of the required software installed on it. Amphetadesk also runs on Windows and the Mac. Easy to add new headline sources. Viewing the news only requires that i visit a 'special' Web page being hosted on my local machine.

Cons: Amphetadesk doesn't have any real security built into it. I can run it via a SSH session to the linux machine at home, and load the generated page from a Mac in the lab at school. Unfortunately, this means that everyone else can too. ;) That worries me. I'm not particularly worried that people will see my headline selections, but I do find it concerning that I can update/add/delete feeds without even entering a password. A good firewall solves this problem - with one, desktop users should be perfectly safe.

~elijah

[Reviewer's note: I've purposely chosen not to discuss Blagg with Blosxom and Peerkat. All three are by the same author. I haven't used Blagg, mostly because it doesn't suit my purposes right now. Maybe later ;)]