With the v1.6.0.0 out of the door, I've shipped what I think is our most interesting feature in years and resolved  an issue that was making RSS Bandit a nuisance to lots of sites on the Internet.

The feature I'm currently working on is an idea I'm calling supporting multiple feed sources. For a few years, we've had support for roaming your feed list and read/unread state between two computers using an FTP site, a shared folder or NewsGator Online. Although useful, this functionality has always seemed bolted on. You have to manually upload and download feeds from these locations instead of things happening automatically and transparently as they do with the typical mail reader + mail server scenario (e.g. Outlook + Exchange) which is the most comparable model.

My original idea for the feature was simply to make the existing NewsGator and RSS Bandit integration work automatically instead of via a manual download so it could be more like Outlook + Exchange. Then I realized that there could never be full integration because there are feeds that RSS Bandit can read that a Web-based feed reader like NewsGator Online can not (e.g. feeds within your company's intranet if you read feeds at work). This meant that we would need an explicit demarcation of feeds that roamed in NewsGator Online and those that were local to that machine.

In addition, I got a bunch of feedback from our users that there were a lot more of them using Google Reader than using NewsGator Online. Since I was already planning to do a bunch of work to streamline synchronizing with NewsGator Online, adding another Web-based feed reader didn't seem like a stretch. I'm currently working on a command line only prototype in IronPython which uses the information from the reverse engineered Google Reader API documentation to retrieve and update my feed subscriptions. I'm about part way through and it seems that the Google Reader API is as full featured as the NewsGator API so we should be good to go.  I should be able to integrate this functionality into RSS Bandit within the next few weeks.

The tricky part will be how the UI integration should work. For example, Google Reader doesn't support hierarchical folders of feeds like we do. Instead there is a flat namespace of tag names but each feed can have one or more tags applied to it. On the flip side, NewsGator Online uses the hierarchical folder model like RSS Bandit does. I'm considering moving to a more Google Reader friendly model in the next release where we flatten hierarchies and instead go with a flat tag-based approach to organizing feeds. For the case, of feeds synchronized from NewsGator Online we will prevent users from putting feeds in multiple categories since that won't be supported by the service.

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