33rd / 424th District Courts

If you are a news junkie, legal news or otherwise, you need to read this.

News aggregation is the use of an online software tool to gather news items in one place. Most portals (e.g. Yahoo and the like) do some degree of pulling together various news sources and placing them on a single page.

However, there is a better way to do it. Actually a couple of ways.

One way is to have a web page on which 'newsfeeds' can be aggregated. That was formerly done on this site but when nobody ever looked at it, I moved all of my feeds to my personal site.

(Note: the following discussion is marginally applicable now, as I've changed my main newsreader technique .. see the comment below on 'new news aggregation technique.)If you want to see how that looks and acts, go to

my personal site and click on the link toward the top for 'news feeds' and you'll get the whole banana. The better way is to look at the left column on that site, below the acknowledgements, and you'll get individual news headlines. Can also look in the left column under 'navigation' and click on 'news aggregator' and look at news by source or by topic, or get a list of the news sources.

If you like any of that, feel free to read them on that site.

The other way to aggregate news is with a program that is specifically designed as a news aggregator. There are many of them but I am familiar with NewsDesk by Wildgrape. It's a standalone program that pulls news feeds in from places you tell it to look at. There is an online service that can be used alone or to which you can subscribe and use feeds to pull them into your own aggregator such as NewsDesk. That's http://www.newsisfree.com. The NewsDesk program is free. The NewsIsFree service ... well, is not. But it's affordable, something like $20 per year.