I was the last of the wingnuts to regularly use an RSS reader. I won’t go into long boring stories and silly details, but suffice it to say I had tried a lot of RSS readers (probably in the neighborhood of 20). FeedDemon was probably my favorite, followed by Sharpreader, but they were all missing one very critical thing.
I tend to browse the web a lot from work. Usually when I’m running some huge SQL package or formatting a hard disk, or something like that. It’s the main way I stay on top of all the blogs in my blogroll, the news, etc. For an RSS reader to be truly useful, it has to be able to keep me up to date on my desktop PC at home and on my desktop PC at work. I hate the thought of having to maintain two separate lists of feeds on two separate computers, especially when I tend to find my most interesting tidbits and sites in that short span of time in the office.
So my quest for finding the perfect RSS reader fell by the wayside. Then I saw someone writing about Bloglines recently. Now I had tried bloglines about a year ago and wasn’t impressed. It was slow, kludgy, and fidgety, and the feeds didn’t always work. In fact, Bloglines basically knocked itself right out of contention on its own with very little consulting with the competition. About a week ago, I decided to try it all over again and I was ultimately impressed.
Bloglines is an online RSS aggregator. Running inside your browser (so far I’ve used it on Firefox and IE and it works flawlessly on both) It allows you to sort your feeds into folders, sort them by name within the folders, and so on. Since it’s an online application, your feeds are stored on Bloglines’ servers and are accessible from any internet-connected PC you care to open them from. A brilliant thing for someone managing multiple computers in their life.
Adding feeds can be accomplished in numerous ways.
1. There’s a bookmarklet that you can drag to your links toolbar in Firefox or IE. The nice thing about this bookmarklet is that for the most part, you don’t have to be on the actual page with the XML feed. If you’re on Insignificant Thoughts, for example, the Bloglines bookmarklet will spider your links really quickly (and I mean really quickly) and give you a choice of any of the feeds available for the site.
2. You can download the Bloglines toolkit for Firefox which allows a right click menu to be added that gives you options such as “Add link to Bloglines” and so on. I prefer the Bookmarklet, but this gives you a nice range of options.
3. You can click an “Add me to Bloglines” button on a site and it’ll add the feed to your Bloglines account.
Very easy right?
The kicker for me was something I didn’t even know.
I’ve been a Pocket PC user for a looooong time. I’ve had my Pocket PC connected to the internet the entire time I’ve owned it. I’ve always loved reading blogs, but doing it on a Pocket PC just flat out sucks. CSS-based blogs never render well on the small screen. However, RSS always works nicely, but we’re back to the same “I don’t wanna keep multiple lists synchronized” problem from before.
Slobokan found the Mobile version of Bloglines buried on their site, which is perfect for viewing on the small screen! So now, I have all my feeds available everywhere. My browser at home / work, my Pocket PC, and my Windows Smartphone. Because of this, bloglines is a keeper for me. If you have lots of feeds and view them on multiple sources, it’s probably perfect for you also.
Check it out at http://www.bloglines.com. And since it’s free, you really have nothing to lose!