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One of the Short Comings of Bloglines
By JLP | January 22, 2006
I use Bloglines to keep track of the websites I follow (some of them are private). One thing I don’t like about Bloglines is the fact that you can’t put folders into folders. I’ve been trying to organize my feeds but am not totally happy with the way it is set up. Are there any better reader services out there? Which reader services do you use? Let me know by leaving a comment.
Topics: Blogging | 8 Comments »
January 22nd, 2006 at 1:13 pm
I use a standalone program called NetNewsWire (it’s for Macs). I can’t access my feeds on the ‘net, but I have a laptop and rarely need net or want net access when I’m away from my computer.
January 22nd, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I’m not satisfied either, I’ve used Newsgator and Bloglines. I’ve recently been just reading every site from my bookmarks, in rotation.
January 22nd, 2006 at 5:02 pm
I use Bloglines and used to love them. They have been having a lot of problems lately with feeds…double posts, giving me the same posts over and over even when I already read them, and not showing my saved posts, even though it says that they should be there. Annoying and something that they really need to fix quickly before people start going someplace else.
As for the folder issue, not sure if anything else does that as I personally have never had a need for such a feature.
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:15 pm
The firefox browser has “live bookmarks” built in and since it’s based on bookmarks, that may give you what you want (folder inside of folders). But since it’s bookmark and browser based, you’ll only see it from one machine (via web-based like bloglines). I haven’t tried it yet since bloglines works fine for me, but if you want to: upgrade to the latest firefox, when you land on a site with a feed, there should be an RSS button in the right of the address bar, if you click on that you will be able to select to add a “live bookmark”. I assume that once you have feeds saved as live bookmarks that you can then organize them like other bookmarks (including folders within folders, open all in tabs, etc). Have fun!
January 22nd, 2006 at 8:18 pm
I used to use bloglines as well, but ended up getting frustrated with it, for the reasons you mention, and some others. Now, I switched to Google Reader (beta) and I am starting to like it. You tag blogs you are subscribed to, but these tags are never really used anywhere at all, sort of weird. However, I have come to not really care what category a blog falls into anymore, maybe because I cannot see them. Also, you can “star” posts and read them later, similar to “keep as read”. I scan all blogs first and star the ones I am interested in reading. Then, when the queue of new posts is empty, I look at the “starred” posts. Another really annoying thing though is that you need to have the exact url of the rss feed, or Google Reader does some weird stuff. Come to think of it, Google Reader still sort of sucks.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:32 pm
I’ve heard good things about rojo. I signed up, but it’s quite different from bloglines, so I haven’t gotten used to it. There’s also searchfox, which you tag, and it USES the tags. They were recently bought by Yahoo. Rojo’s web2.0, and very fast.. no frames, and so I can’t speak much of liking it’s interface. Rojo you also get to tag and flag articles, but it doesn’t let you use subcategories. I tried to just signup for searchfox, but it’s got php errors and isn’t taking registrations.
really, I know how important it is to have a web based aggregator, but I started using Thunderbird at home, and love it. It does allow subfolders, and the best part of it to me, is that it shows the whole web page of the article. So you get to see it just like it was a web page. To me, that’s awesome, and can’t be beat.
January 22nd, 2006 at 11:13 pm
If you use FireFox, there’s also an RSS reader plugin called Sage (I think). Might be worth checking out.
January 23rd, 2006 at 4:16 am
Until recently I was a solid BlogLines user, and found it served well enough. I gave Google Reader a go, but though it was a bit alpha for a beta – way too resource intensive and not responsive enough.
My fave now though is Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s a combined email client, News reader and RSS aggregator. I use PortableApps.com’s portable version from my CF card and just carry that with me (with a tiny USB-CF dongle wherever I go. It’s portable, and you can browse downloaded stuff/compose posts, etc while offline.