James Robertson let me know about BottomFeeder. I already know about BF because James was the absolute fastest to respond to my message about supporting gzip encoding in the aggregator. One day I sent the mail, and the next morning support was in. A testament to Smalltalk (and to James). Unforunately, I'm not ready to pick up Smalltalk, although Patrick Logan's evaluation of the new VisualWorks has me thinking.

Far better to build your important computational assets in a notation that is already long-lived, simple, flexible, and efficient, not to mention mostly unchanged for 20-30 years or more. There are a two of these notations that make sense to me: Lisp and Smalltalk.

I could go with either. Smalltalk is easier to explain to developers using other object-oriented languages.

Kevin Burton stopped by about NewsMonster -- I am very interested in giving this a shot, but don't have the time until next week. I tried 1.0B1 and had troubles with the install. More on this later.

Greg Reinacker left a comment suggesting NewsGator. My big problem with NewGator is Outlook. I use Outlook to read mail, mostly because it talks to my address book, which talks to my PocketPC. But Outlook XP is really slow at processing IMAP mail (I'm not sure why, and I haven't been able to fix it), and almost everyday I think about switching off. It's probably only a matter of time. I wish that other Windows mail reader could use the Outlook contacts database as their address book. Things like contacts and calendar data should be a service available to different applications. I know that you can do this via COM, but very few people seem to be doing this. Almost everybody reinvents an address book and none of them can talk to the PocketPC.

Ooops. "There I go again".