A Personal Blog
Looking for a New RSS Reader…
I’ve decided it’s time to think about dumping Bloglines. Between the outages, the inability to search feeds, the duplicate feeds and the fact that it often takes hours for new posts to appear it just isn’t worth the hassle anymore.
The problem is that I LOVE the way Bloglines displays feeds: as one massive page (ie: a River of News). Anyone know of any other decent readers that function the same way?
About the author
| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on January 6, 2006 at 10:42 am, and is filed under From My Life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
Comments are closed.
about 6 years ago
Have you tried Google Reader?
It adds new items to your reading list in the order that they were published, regardless of source. It would be nice to have more control over sorting them (by source would be nice), but if you’re looking for a river of news it might be what you’re looking for.
I ditched Bloglines ages ago, I’m back on Thunderbird now. I doubt I’ll ever find my perfect RSS reader. I’ll probably end up programming my own.
about 6 years ago
Good question Jeremy. I’m starting to be “open” to suggestions as well. I have been very satisfied with Bloglines though. Just read about their “clipping” feature which may help me now, but I’ve always been stumped by their supposed “search” functionality. I was hoping Google Reader was going to be the answer, but their layout is awful.
about 6 years ago
I tried Google Reader, and besides the slowness and inability to import hundreds of feeds (I just tried again and it choked), it just doesn’t feel “right”…
Besides, I’d rather have a desktop reader.
about 6 years ago
I’ve been more than happy with Bloglines despite some of the things you mention like occassional outages and posts not showing for hours (seems to have improved in this respect over the last few weeks but maybe that’s Christmas related?).
My main reason for using it is because it’s the best RSS reader I’ve found that’s browser based so I can check it anywhere I am rather than relying on Thunderbird just on my desktop at home.
Blogline still gets the thumbs up from me.
about 6 years ago
FeedDemon has a “newspaper” mode that lets you replicate that river feeling. I suspect other clients do as well (I’ve been happy with FeedDemon so haven’t played with others). One possible annoyance: When you get somewhere north of 400 feeds in a “channel group,” you start getting an annoying popup every time you try to add a new feed, something like “This will result in a group with 423 feeds. Are you sure you don’t want to do a better job of organizing things, you slob?” (well, or words to that effect). Click OK and it imports the feed fine..
about 6 years ago
I just left bloglines for similar reasons – well, that and just the clunkiness of it. I’m on newsgator now. It’s a free or pay to upgrade product – so, they have the resources for more tools, integrations and maintenance. So far, I really like it – posts don’t automatically show as read, it includes a clip file (like furl) and the interface is just cleaner. Plus, I’m a netscape user and newsgator works much better with that browser – automatically opening new tabs for click thrus, displaying cleanly, etc.
(Oh, and it’s browser-based for free – or outlook-based for cheap)
Enjoy-
about 6 years ago
If it weren’t for partial feeds (ugh), then I’d be more than happy with a desktop reader (Thunderbird is great), but when you constantly have to copy link locations and open up the full post in firefox, it gets far too tedious to be worth it.
For now I’m stuck on bloglines.
about 6 years ago
Have you tried Feeddemo? It cost $30 but it’s an excellent, albeit PC bound, RSS reader!
about 6 years ago
Try Feed On Feeds. Server side, PHP based. If you’re in Winnipeg on Tuesday, I’ll be demoing it along with Greasemonkey and some other cool web stuff :)
Sean
about 6 years ago
Maybe take a look at BlogBridge (www.blogbriidge.com) which is an open source project that I’ve been working on. It’s really more of a power tool for someone who follows hundreds and hundreds of feeds, with fancy filtering, sorting, feed discovery and other cool stuff. The detault display is not River of News, but its really easy to set one up – and not “just a river” – but for example, a river of all unread articles, or all articles that mention “Microsoft”, “Google”, etc. So very flexible. Also it’s free, cross platform and open source.
about 6 years ago
All good recommendations everyone. I’ll do some poking around over the weekend.
about 6 years ago
“duplicate feeds” is a problem with the feed provider, as is the rehash of feeds, particularly from Weblogs Inc sites. Basically the source site republishes the whole feed and you get the same stories again day after day after day. I’ve tried other RSS readers and same probs. Certainly I haven’t noticed any major outages lately and I’m yet to find anything that replaces Bloglines…and I’ve tried. Rojo is probably the closest in terms of functionality, but you’ll come back to bloglines….just wait and see :-)
about 6 years ago
NewzCrawler was my favorite on the PC with both tree and newspaper views. You could also try Dave Winer’s RiverOfNews beta project at scripting.com.
Or you could switch to the Mac like I did and use NetNewsWire.
about 6 years ago
Like to give FeedLounge a spin?
about 6 years ago
I like Bloglines for the simplicity and the ability to manage feeds via folders. The whole riverof news things is just not appropriate – I like to tier and compartmentalise how and when I read the 150 or so feeds I subscribe to.
My ideal solution would be for Bloglines to refine its current offering.
about 6 years ago
Newsgator is also my vote. The web edition is slick but I absolutely love the Outlook edition. I can literally ‘forward’ a blog post since they show up as an email.
about 6 years ago
Another vote for Feeddemon … handles the 556 feeds I currently manage with ease. (no I don’t read them all – most are just there to be searched by keyword watch lists).
Also means I can manage feeds while offline – something handy when I’ve been busy away on a project for a couple of days and have several hundred unread posts to wade through on the flight home.
about 6 years ago
http://kinja.com
is definetly the best reader out there. if you are at all curious “how a blog is doing” you get all kinds of information. they also show you other blogs tagged in the same category.
http://kinja.com/id.knj?url=ensight.org
about 6 years ago
I liked Bloglines alot, but I found a much better reader. It is “Great News: The Intelligent RSS “Reader:” http://www.curiostudio.com/
The features are dexribed here: http://www.curiostudio.com/feature.html
It is integreted with Bloglines, so the transition is easy,
Great News is a beta download, but works great.
about 6 years ago
http://newsalloy.com/
about 6 years ago
Hello, I’m still using Bloglines but I’m considering to migrate too. Try with Rojo, maybe you will like it: http://www.rojo.com/
about 6 years ago
I still use bloglines for a remote reader. I do not know if you would consider a software based option but I like RSSOwl. It imports perfectly from bloglines and allows offline viewing.
As far as the others some of you readers have suggested, I have tried many of them. I still like bloglines because of the interface. I however have, more or less, migrated to the owl for my lappy and home use.
I don’t know when you have run into problems with bloglines but, in the time I have used the service (I bet about 3 years), I have only run into the “plumber” once. Maybe that is because I only use it on my lunch break. I use the blog as a notebook so to speak. Then I grab the stuff for use elsewhere.
I usually have the Owl grab everything via modem and just read it or tag it to read when I am online.