I'm a happy camper reading feeds through software, RSS Bandit in particular, as I've covered before. But when I'm traveling, I've learned to keep off the feeds entirely. I don't need to find I have 5,000 items built up if I'm running around for a week. Still, I want to check in on things to see if major stuff is going on. That's where online feedreaders come in.

I'm hardly the first to want to sync between my software solution and an online solution, so don't expect any major answers from me. But I wanted to jot some impressions down of what I like and dislike, as I've looked for a suitable online solution before leaving on a short trip this Sunday and Monday.

NewsGator Online was a natural first choice for me. I still have an account there from when I used the Newsgator software. In addition, RSS Bandit will let me "Remote Storage" my feed data there. So I fired that up, entering my user info for NewsGator to see what would happen.

Nice! Over at Newsgator, all my feeds were neatly categorized into the same folders as with RSS Bandit. The only downside? NewsGator thinks I have 3,434 unread items at the moment. Sure, I haven't read them at NewsGator, but most of them I've already read through RSS Bandit. I want an option to mark all of these as read. So far, I haven't found it.

Bloglines was my next stop. Barry Schwartz, Gary Price love it. Heck, Jim Lanzone who runs Ask.com loved it so much he bought it. Me? I never warmed to it much. It warmer with me now.

RSS Bandit won't sync with Bloglines, so I had to import my OPML file. Before doing that, I wanted to delete all my old data in Bloglines, to have a fresh start. I had like 70 feeds in there already from an earlier experiment and wanted have a clean slate. Figuring out how to do this took some time.

Eventually I realized if I went to My Feeds, then used Edit, then clicked on the first feed, that would select it. Holding shift, I moved down to the last feed, which let me select them all. Then I clicked Trash, and that wiped them out. Actually, I had to do this three times, since not all of them got deleted at once despite all being selected.

After this, Bloglines thought I had tons of reading left to do. That was easily solved using the Mark All Read option. Now, I'm well set to check in on new stuff since I last used RSS Bandit.

I tried Netvibes next, as I've heard some buzz about the service. Importing my OPML file worked great. Feeds just as with NewsGator and Bloglines were all grouped into different categories. Unfortunately, there was no way to drag the folder containing ALL my feeds to a Netvibes tab -- nor could I drag a subfolder. That would have been cool -- a single tab for each category of news, such as all the official search engine blogs or all the marketing blogs I read.

Google Reader came next. I was pleased to discover that a mass delete option has been added since I last played with things there. I cleared out all my old stuff and imported the latest from my OPML. Unfortunately, I'm unlikely to use it much despite this fresh start.

My feed categories got turned into labels, so that if I click labels and select a particular one, I only see feed items from blogs labeled that way. Nice. But the overview of all blogs on the home page threw me off. It was sorted by date, oldest item first. I wanted newest. At the bottom, the option was to toggle between date sort and auto sort. Auto sort got newer items at the top, but not always. And there was no mark all items as read option.

Rojo is another tool I've used before. I need to clean house there, so I hit My Feeds, then used Edit, then found no way to delete all items at once. But the unsubscribe links next to each feed work super fast, so click click click, and about 70 were gone in less than a minute. After important, none of my feed categories were maintained. Bummer. Nor was there an option to mark all stories as read.

Next up will be to see how these things actually work. If I see an interesting item, which makes it easier for me to flag and follow-up on when I'm back to my regular work routine?

I'm not checking on how to stay synced with RSS Bandit while on the road, however. It might be nice to have it be aware of things I've already read, but since I'm only doing quick looks, that's not a big priority to me.

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