A day in the life of a Middle Manager...

RSS Aggregators

As Carla knows, thanks to various strange programs appearing on this PC, I've been looking for a decent RSS Aggregator for a while. I've tried a few programs but none of them have really grabbed me... On the Mac, things are different, there are lots of readers but a clear (and I mean clear) front-runner -- NetNewsWire. Shrook sounds very cool though, especially as you appear to be able to sync your Mac subs to an online service at shrook.com for when you're away.

On the PC I tried Amphetadesk which is the one I stayed with the longest as its both free and cross-platform.

I tried FeedDemon which is excellent but had a couple of shortcomings (for me)

1. its $29.95
2. I couldn't find a way to customise the group listings or have two users.

Believe me, I don't mind paying for software I'm going to use a lot. I just have to be convinced it's going to be a great piece of software that I can see myself using and being able to customise the way I want. Agent is the prime example of this as it gets used every day by myself and Carla. I was perfectly happy to pay $29.95 for that in 1996!

There are many many others out there like Sharpreader and Feedreader but, on the PC, they all appear to need the MS .NET framework which I couldn't be bothered downloading just to see if I liked any of them...

So, I was starting to despair -- would I ever find a decent RSS aggregator for the PC? It was starting to feel like I wouldn't... Then I noticed a web-based service called Bloglines start to appear in my referer logs. "What's this?" thinks I and toodles off to have a lookee-see. Didn't really look like something I'd use so I promptly forgot about it -- this was about 2 months ago.

I revisited the service two days ago -- it's now my aggregator for the blogs I read that have RSS feeds. It's that good. There are only two three very small niggles I have with it

• It isn't RESTful and therefore doesn't know what I've read and what I haven't -- essentially once the server delivers the XML and shows the contents it assumes I've read it.
• The Javascript doesn't work properly in Firefox 0.8.
• You can't choose the refresh interval (in reality though I guess this is fair enough).

Otherwise its great and, IMHO, can only improve.

Some noteable blogs I like (I was going to give examples here but didn't think that was fair) don't have a feed so I have to remember to visit which I don't every day. They know who they are...

Come on people, get with the program! ;)

Web-based aggregators have one MAJOR advantage... You can get to your RSS feeds wherever you are as long as you have web access. With software solutions if you don't have your PC/Mac with you then tough luck, no RSS.

In terms of web services bloglines appears to be the most popular aggregator and certainly appears to be getting lots of mentions. There are other web-based readers of course, like Rocketinfo and MyWireService but, for now, bloglines is the one for me.