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famed wss expert mike walsh had a chance to post about feedreader, you should check out his comments.  one thing he points out that is interesting is the last comment about writing competitive freeware products when free ones already exist.  it is an interesting point to ponder...like, how many different types of plain text editors can you have and are the feature gaps enough to warrant saying “it's better”?

at any rate, i've seen a bunch of rss web parts come out recently for sharepoint and thought i'd note on some of them.  most of them seem to be a derivitive of the xml web part that comes with sharepoint...a wise idea since rss is an xml format anyway...simply apply an xsl stylesheet and you are good to go.

but let's say you can't spell xsl...

my web part (to toot my own horn here...the first public web part for rss and sharepoint services) adds value in several areas.  first, xml web part only allows a single xml document (either url or text)--and some other rss web parts also have this limitation.  feedreader allows multiple in one web part with no additional configuration.  feedreader also provides value by adding caching capabilities (do you really want a request to go out every time the page refreshes?!?!), item filtering by date and counts, collapse/expand capabilities to read the summary comments, initial atom 0.3 feed support [note: see known issues on feedreader].  the xml web part can't offer you these (i would argue can't, but i'll at least say “can't easily offer”) out of the box.  feedreader can...and guess what, it's free too.

thanks for the notes mike...i appreciate it.  i also appreciate competition...it makes me strive to see what i can do better (which is the main reason i've been holding off the workspace view web part...another one that i released and many more followed, some good and some not so good).

Please enjoy some of these other recent posts...

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