Feed Me

I think I’ve tried just about every feed delivery service there is, or at least it feels that way. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the blog aggregator service that’s right for me. I know, a problem worthy of losing sleep over. The thing is, I’m writing for Blogher, and I need to stay up to date on what all the wominz are up to, and be timely about noticing.

Right now, I’m using Thunderbird to organize my feeds, but the list is getting long since I’m watching a lot of new blogs for Blogher, and it’s hard to manage. Now I’m actually considering Feed Lounge (which costs MONEY but looks nice) as an alternative to web-based feed browsing made ugly.

I can’t help it if I’m swayed by style and design, people.

Anyway, there are a few thing I’m looking for in an aggregator:

• The ability to have some feeds delivered to my email address.

• Instant notification of new posts.

• The ability to easily click away from my notification and view the post in its natural habitat.

• Yes it has to look cute. Or at least not be ugly.

I tried this WinRSS thing as a firefox extension, but it doesn’t handle non-RSS (ie Atom, RDF) feeds very well. In fact, for a week or so it thought MB was Finslippy and vice-versa. Do you have any idea how confusing it is to think you’re reading a snippet of MB and hear about living in Brooklyn or a snippet of Alice and see photos of Owen’s birthday party? It was too much for my feeble little mind to handle. WinRSS went buh bye.

What’s my point, you ask? Well first off, tell me what you use to aggregate your feeds. Next, tell me if you use Feed Lounge and if you like it. Then tell me to relax, it’s Wednesday and it’s nice outside.

netnewswire. netnewswire. netnewswire.

http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

umm unless you don’t use a mac… in which case I NEVER WANT TO SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN.

kidding. sorta. heh.

Hi there!
I have become completely dependant on bloglines.com - it works for me!

Sweetney - I’m so not on a Mac.

Anita - Thank you, someone else mentioned Bloglines to me, I’m going to have to check it out.

There’s GoogleReader [in beta=difficult to manage]; there’s the aformentioned bloglines, which doesn’t really do anything for me; there’s the new FeedButler[.com], but it’s beta AND somehow social bookmarking [kind of murky on the details]; there’s Sage, the firefox extension, but haven’t tried it.

Good luck finding one you like. FeedLounge looks good aside from the price. If you want free, VersionTracker.com will probably have some Windows freeware feedreaders to try, if you haven’t gone there yet.

[and hilarious on the finslippy mixup.]

p.s. Relax, it’s wednesday.

Oh I hadn’t heard of Sage, I’m checking that out now. Awesome!

http://www.rssreader.com/

I use this - but I also use the Evil outlook.
Though, there is also google feedreader - its an online service that lets you email stuff relatively easily.

http://google.com/reader - in the highly unlikely event you need a gmail account, holler if you like.
I should also probably add that I like feedreader as a standalone thing, but it doesn’t do the email thang as far as I’m aware.
http://feedreader.com/

I know what you mean! I used to use an RSS aggregator and it worked fine until I had a lot of feeds to monitor. Then, it was just too clunky. I could not find anything that worked for me so I wrote my own application, which you can check out at zaptxt.com.

ZapTXT is not an RSS aggregator per se, because I was more interested in adding the convenience of an RSS feed to the mobility of my cell phone, but the program does address all of your concerns (okay, it’s not cute, but we are working on it). ZapTXT allows you to do a couple of things that make life easier. It allows you to define criteria that will monitor the RSS links that you specify and send you alerts in your email and/or on your cell phone when a post matches your search criteria. Each email has a direct link to the original post and all alerts are kept in your ZapTXT account so if you accidentally delete an email, you can still find your info online.

Please check out ZapTXT and let me know what you think. I can’t say that the site has style, but the service is free and our design can only get better.

http://habarixenu.mozdev.org/

I’ve been using this lately. It’s an extension for firefox/mozilla. Works well, works from bookmarks, etc.

Sage is okay, although I dumped it because I more or less needed to use an online aggregator–I use two computers, a laptop for school/etc and a desktop for home, and I couldn’t find any program that was good at keeping them synched. So I use Bloglines. But Bloglines sort of sucks, I think. It’s ugly and prone to technical difficulties and updates feeds hourly at most (so it’s not great for trying to keep up with often-updated time-sensitive feeds).

In other words, it depends what you need. If you only use one computer I would definitely push you away from a web services RSS aggregator, but if you need access from everywhere Bloglines is probably the best one I’ve tried.

Also, Bloglines and everyone else I think allows you to import/export OPML files, which are basically just lists of your feeds with title info etc attached. So it’s not too hard to move between one aggregator and another if you want to try lots of different things.