The RSS feed-reader is undoubtedly one of the most-used internet application on my computer, immediately following the browser and mail client.
I've gone through a number of feed-readers, but I have never been able to settle on one particular one. Most of them work well, but there's always at least one kicker somewhere that bugs the heck out of me and prompts me to look for an alternative.
Sage and
Newsgator both fell into this category.
The nicest part about Sage is the integration with
Firefox and the ease with which it can auto-detect and subscribe to feeds. But it leaves a lot to be desired - for example, there's no way to set it up to check feeds periodically and report the results somehow. This means that everytime I want to go through my feeds, I have to hit the refresh button and wait till each feed is checked...a big waste of time. There is also no way to search for something within the feeds I subscribe to, although there is a search box for Feedster and some other search engines. I can't save specific posts for future reference either. Finally, there's no cumulative newspaper view for all the subscribed feeds, which means that if I want to skim through everything, I have to click each feed individually. These four reasons (the first one being the most important) were enough to turn me away from an otherwise
great Firefox extension. I used NewsGator
before I turned to Sage, and it did address some of the gripes I have with Sage, but it brought problems of it's own.
So now I turn to
Bloglines. It's been around for a long time, but I never thought I'd like it. This is a unique approach that works differently from traditional feed-reader applications in the sense that it's almost completely web-based. I say "almost" because there are two
superb extensions for Firefox that will probably allow me to settle on Bloglines as my final feed-reader once and for all. The
Bloglines Toolkit extension adds a context menu item with a few useful options, but the best part about it is that it creates a little notification icon at the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window that notifies me unobtrusively when any of my feeds have been updated. This is a god-send. The other extension is
LiveLines which allows you to subscribe to feeds with a single-click using the little, orange "Live Bookmarks" icon in Firefox. With Bloglines, I can also search through my feeds, as well as save certain particularly interesting posts as "Clippings" for future reference...I like this since I tend to frequently blog about stuff that I read.
I'm sold!
(I should also mention that since Bloglines is web-based, it's completely cross-platform and you can even access your feeds from public computers anywhere)
