I don’t really think of MagpieRSS as being an aggregator. It was afterall designed to be an RSS parsing library. However in the pursuit of a simple API that could be dropped into a dynamic page, it seems to have sprouted a number of the key features of a modern aggregator.

Over time people have developed a few metrics for measuring such:

  • Supports GZIP encoding for reduced bandwidth usage, check
  • Supports Conditional GETS/Etags for intelligent fetching based on last modifieded dates, check (anyone know of a good list of Etag compliant aggregators?)
  • Supports secure RSS feeds, including feeds protected by HTTPAuth, and SSL, check

Looks like Danny is starting to put together a page pulling this sort of information together, but it doesn’t look done yet.