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.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Danny- A couple weeks ago I discovered that the Great News desktop RSS reader (http://www.curiostudio.com/) syncs with Bloglines. I follow like 200 feeds and use Great News at home and Bloglines at work and on the road. I’ve found the sync functionality very useful so far… might be another one to check out. J
Great article, but a bit confusing for those of us who are new to feeds.
Why even have a desktop RSS Feed? How do you read 70 feeds a day anyway? And Jason follows 200! That’s just not practical for the average business person. Somehow, our news preferences need a more advanced solution. Also, how to get relevant news out there from new sources without all the effort. Lastly, rss search is a joke. When I search on keywords in any of the blog search engines, including Google Blogger Search, Sphere and Weblogs, I get spam out the wazoo.
RSS and Atom Feed Search is marginal at best. To sum things up, we need to find and manage these feeds in a more user intuitive way.
If you look at my other post, it covers how I tend to read a bunch of stories on one “river of news” style stream. Think about a newspaper. You don’t read every story in it. Nor do I read every article in my feed stream. I scan the headlines and read what’s of interest to me. And when you have so many feeds, a stream I find is much easier than trying to read feed by feed.
I agree on blog search — it struggles if you go purely by keyword search and time ranking. Google allows you to rank by what it considers relevancy; Technorati lets you up the “authority,” and I’ve found Ask’s blog search to be better on the spam a bit.