Banal Minutiae

I thought I’d give a quick update of my experience with Bloglines. As I said yesterday, I need to move away from an offline reader, and migrate to an online solution. I’ve found two, Bloglines and Newsgator. I talked about Newsgator yesterday, and some of it’s limitations. I forgot to mention one of it’s strengths: if you have Feedburner, their offline reader tool, you can synchronize your feeds across multiple computers. Nice.

However, as I said, the limitation of 40 new articles is pretty crippling. I’m not sure If there is a workaround or not, but I haven’t found one yet.

That said, I decided to evaluated Bloglines, which is a similar aggregator service, with the slight difference that offer a blog host as well as two different features: clippings and playlists. I’m not going to talk about the clippings and playlists features, since I haven’t used either one yet. Perhaps later.

The blog feature is a basic blog, doesn’t seem like anything special, no templates, etc… Since I use WordPress, I’m not really interested.

What I’m really interested in is the RSS aggregator feature. This works great. It doesn’t seem to have any of the limitations that plague Newsgator. I think we may have a winner. Right now, I don’t have any negatives.

I’ll do an update later with more details.

Okay, start of a new year. Like so many others out there, I made a few New Year’s resolutions.
First, since our IT department has gone hardcore, and limited software on our machines to company installed only (a rant for another time), I was forced to eliminate by beloved GreatNews. This has forced me to move to a web based solution for getting my RSS fix for the day.

I’ve found two possible candidates that meet the bill for a fix. They are Bloglines and Newsgator.

I started with Newsgator about a week ago, and thought I’d give you a summary of my week’s experiences as a sort of mini-review.

Newsgator looks good. Let’s get that out of the way. I only found a single feed that didn’t work correctly (The Superficial). For some reason, images on that feed appear as html links to the real images. Strange since they work correctly in GreatNews.

The layout for reading is decent, as is performance. I’m pretty happy overall with the way it handles everything, with a single, mind numbingly painful exception. This is a deal ender, folks. That limitation is the inability to have more than 40 new messages in a feed. Also, there appears to be a limitation with the exact age of a message. For example, it appears to me you can’t go back over 2 weeks. Messages you haven’t read are simply ignored/deleted.

Of course, this could possibly be my stupidity. There might very well be an option to fix this, but my brief search wasn’t able to find a fix. This is a killer for high volume feeds like del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, etc…

This week I’ve started on Bloglines, a similar service, which has the distinct difference in that it allows more unread messages per feed, and doesn’t seem to have the same limitations that Newsgator has. However, you’ll have to wait a while for a full update.