Karlin Lillington tells us that William Gibson is ending his blog. While I agree that this is a loss, it's not an earth shattering loss to me. I'm a Gibson fan, and I'll be able to read what he writes -- I might not get all the background that could be picked up from the blog, but I'll get something. I got into blogs because I found that the technical bloggers were producing a lot of interesting and worthwhile stuff. So while I'm sad to see Gibson go, I'd be alot sadder to see Carlos, Rickard, Jon Tirsen, Jon Udell, Sam Ruby, or any of a number of other folks end their blogs.

I got on Usenet back in 1984, before it became a cesspool, and I learned a lot from reading posts in the technical newsgroups. Today's technical blogosphere has the same feel to it for me. I always find at least one interesting thing to consider or learn.

You won't get the UNIX Barf Bag (I've got mine) but if you missed the era of operating systems before Windows and Unix/Linux, then The Unix Hater's Handbook would be a good introduction to some of what used to be available before the "Worse is Better" operating systems took over the world. I like Linux, only because it's preferable to the alternatives, but not because it's the best that we could be doing.

In my more cynical/despairing moments, I like to tell people that computer scientists regularly reinvent the wheel, doing it a little bit worse each time around.

Here's the latest update, including new visitors to my server logs and e-mails/comments from aggregator developers.

• Aggie 1.0 RC5 - supported
• AmphetaDesk - no support planned until after 1.0
• Bottom Feeder - supported
• Channel Buddy - not supported - but private in-house aggregator used by "a totlal of two people in the world"
• effnews - supported
• FeedReader - unsupported
• Hep - supported in 0.4
• java.blogs aggregator - no plans to implement GZip support
• Magpie RSS - not supported
• NetNewsWire - added to feature request list
• Newsgator - support in an unspecified future version
• nntp//rss - supported in 0.3
• ping.blog.gs - awaiting a reply
• Radio Userland - unsupported but Andre Radke has written a plugin supporting gzip.
• RSS Bandit - needs support
• SharpReader - needs support
• Straw - supported
• Syndirella - support planned for 0.92 but no longer being maintained
• Wildgrape NewsDesk - support in an unspecified future release