RSS Aggregators
My friends Rob and Pete are discussing the pros and cons of the Google Reader. Rob expressed a liking for Google Reader and Pete said “No thanks, I’ll stick to NewsGator.”
I use NewsGator for my company’s internal blogs since it’s a client-based aggregator which runs on my machine which has physical network access to those feeds. for everything else, I use Bloglines.
Bloglines, like the Google Reader, is a server-based aggregator. Server-based aggregators are nice since they keep you synchronized between work and home without requiring a company-synchronized laptop or VPN connection. Also, Bloglines supports my mobile device so I can read my blogs while on the can or the train.
I’ve tried Google Reader before and I must admit that I feel the same way Pete does. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time. Like Pete, I never felt fully empowered to manipulate my feeds and entries the way I wanted to.
Bloglines works by breaking down your blogs much like NewsGator. To the left is a listing of your blogs and blog folders. When you click on a blog, it’s entries are presented in the right pane. The act of blog-clicking also marks all of the recent entries as read. This makes reading blogs quick and easy. You can undo this if you find you don’t have time to finish the unread entries.
Personally, I wish I could tell Bloglines to show me at most 10 items per click. More than a few times I’ve “avoided” a busy blog because I knew I wouldn’t have time to read all gazillion entries at once. This delay exasperates the problem since the next time I sit down, there might be double gazillion entries.
You can organize your entries into folders and clicking on that folder will consolidate all of the entries into a single list of unread items on the right. Notice below how my “friends” folder is highlighted and entries consolidated from multiple blogs are seen on the right:
I’ve written about Bloglines many times before. For a while, they seemed to stop development on it. That seems to have changed, recently, as a stream of new features have been showing up steadily over the past few months.
I encourage anyone who prefers the server-based aggregator model to try Bloglines.