Primordial Ooze

Bloglines and OPML

I finally got around to organizing my blogroll on Bloglines. I'm really diggin' bloglines lately and I'm totally sold on the idea of a server-based aggregator. At least for my digital lifestyle. There are so many solutions out there that it took me a while to find something that seemed natural and causes me the least pain.

I was a die-hard NewsGator fan and I thought it insane to read blogs on anything but Outlook. There I was with a solution that brought everything right to my doorstep. Until I was home. Sure, I could login to my corporate VPN but this was an extra step that I started getting annoyed with. Sure, I could read my blogs offline with NewsGator (since Outlook provides that) but I eventually found that it was too cumbersome to have my laptop out on the train.

I tried to use bloglines and newsgator simultaneously, but my list of feeds kept getting mismatched. So, I made the switch to bloglines and I can't see myself going back.

For one, bloglines downloads the latest blogs at the server so I never have to wait for a feed poll to finish. A handy client notifier application allows me to get alerted whenever my feeds get updated.

Plus, my blogroll is accessible via JavaScript or through direct http. This allowed me to include my blogroll in my blog's right panel (go see).

I find that I don't need the offline capabilities of NewsGator on the train since I've been listening to a neverending playlist of Podcasts.

Next up, I want to write a client application that will pull off my Podcast folder from my blogroll and insert it into feeds.txt or favorites.txt file that i-podder.js and iPodder use. Unfortunately, the blogroll is in an XHTML fragment. To manipulate it I'll have to parse it which  won't be nearly as much fun as parsing OPML.