I had heard good things about
BlogLines, so I thought I
would give it a spin. I didn't plan on switching, but I did:
that's how good it is.
What sold me was the integration with the way I use
Mozilla. With SharpReader, I would skim titles, dip into
those that seemed interesting. Of those that merited further
investigation, I would open in a separate window, and come back to
once I had completed my initial scan.
With Bloglines, I skim articles, and open the ones that merit
further investigation in a separate tab. All in all, I'm
finding that I can read more in less time.
Other benefits: by being server based, I don't have to worry
about keeping machines synchronized. Also by fetching feeds
once and then serving them multiple times, Bloglines acts as a
collector/distributor, which will make feeds even more
scalable.
Now for two niglets:
Bloglines appears to understand content:encoded, xhtml:body,
and atom:content. While this is good, I'd like an option to
prefer description and atom:summary instead. This is based on
my usage pattern: I would prefer to see a summary and then open in
the background the full text for later perusal.
The interface isn't RESTful. HTTP GETs are not
idempotent. What this means in practical terms is that once
the server has provided the entries, the assumption is that I have
read them. Even if, for some reason I close the
window.
All things considered, Bloglines has become my new default
aggregator.
Bloglines vs. RSS Reader Panel
Sam Ruby just converted to a server-side news aggregator called Bloglines. I like the idea behind server-side news aggregators, and I think that Bloglines is a good implementation of one. However, after trying it out, I still prefer the RSS......
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It has some minor quirks in organizing folders. It's kinda difficult to put an item on an empty folder. I ended up editing my OPML file manually and importing it on a new account.
But they are always improving it and fixing bugs. I've sent an e-mail asking for a feature and they replied in a matter of hours. A couple of days passed, and then I saw the thing implemented. Really sweet.
Ish. Also, ick. That would be annoying, since saving throws up a popup asking where, and the problem is just to keep them from going away before you expect them to, not a desire to save them for all time.
The problem is that if you refresh the window (right-click another tab, aim for Refresh tab and hit Refresh all tabs instead), or accidentally click a feed link in the menu frame, that's it, your new items are gone. Trying to get them back by displaying new-last-hour can be interesting (who knew Scoble was already publishing his 2009 posts?), but given the nature of per-item times in RSS, it's generally not the same thing as "all items that were new in the last hour." Combination of two problems, possibly neither one can be solved, but as Sam says, a GET on /myblogs/ isn't idempotent, and then there's no way back to "new to me -1", "new to me -2".
Sam, you may find Corral interesting. it's another server based aggregator. it doesn't have all the features that bloglines does, but it was designed to be RESTful. the biggest drawback right now is that it's running off my workstation, so it isn't exactly fast or reliable. but the code is available, so you can run it on your own mod_perl enabled server.
I finally completed the first 稿子 - Gao3 Zi5 - Draft of my Seminar Paper tonight. This is good news for me, and good news for anybody who would like to see a new version of Feed on Feeds. I haven't...
Bloglines puts the number of subscribers in the User-Agent when it fetches your feed, so you can see exactly how well it's scaling. 839 Bloglines users subscribe to my Atom feed, but of course it only fetches it once.
Two minor gripes: several people are subscribed to old locations of feeds that permanently redirect (301) to the new location. But Bloglines continues to fetch the feed at the old URL, only to be told over and over again that the feed is permanently at a new address.
The other thing is that, if no one is subscribed to a feed, Bloglines still fetches it. I've created a few temporary feeds for testing purposes, subscribed, then unsubscribed, but Bloglines is still fetching them even though it admits (in the User-Agent) that no one is subscribed to them.
One thing I've noticed (unless it's something completely obvious and I'm just missing it) is that there's no way, as a subscriber, to modify the URL of a subscribed feed without deleting it and recreating the subscription. For example, there's no way to simply edit a feed so that you're pulling a site's Atom feed as opposed to, say, their old excerpts-only RSS 0.91 feed.
I use sharp reader as well, what I did though was configure my browser (Moz Firebird/FireFox) to open external links in a new tab in the same window (I might have used the tab browser extensions to do this). I then just run through sharp reader opening clicking when I find an interesting link and then tabbing through them all at the end. This has the benefits of being able to bookmark all your tabs as well so you can go back and read all the unread items later, as well as maintaining all the downloaded feeds in sharp reader as well.
What sold me was the integration with the way I use Mozilla.
That's exactly what sold me on BlogLines at first. It was only after I started using it that I realized how easy it was to use from, say, somebody else's computer. It is a really nice service.
Thanks for all the great comments and suggestions. We really appreciate it. I can't respond to everything here, but a couple of things:
Re: crawling feeds with 0 subscribers. This has been the subject of internal debate for us for awhile now. The idea behind that was that even if a feed had no subscribers, having the data would make the search database more complete. We have just changed the crawler to not index feeds with 0 subscribers while we re-evaluate this. Most likely we will switch to a system where we will continue to crawl a feed with 0 subscribers for N days, possibly a week. If after that there are still no subscribers, we'll stop crawling the feed and remove it from the database.
Re: 301 redirects. We need to change the URLs permanently in the database when we get these redirects, and we aren't now. One of the things that complicates this is that sometimes web servers will be mis-configured temporarily. Most likely we will also go with an algorithm that says if we get 301s for N days (maybe 2 or 3), then permanently change the URL.
Thanks for all the great feedback, and if you have any additional feedback or questions, feel free to email support@bloglines.com
Sam Ruby: Bloglines Bloglines I had heard good things about BlogLines, so I thought I would give it a spin. I didn't plan on switching, but I did: that's how good it is. What sold me was the integration with the way I use Mozilla. With SharpReader, I would skim titles, dip into those that seemed interesting. Of those that merited further investigation, I would open in a separate window, and come back to once I had completed my initial scan. Taking Sam Ruby's advice, I'm giving Bloglines a shot. I've just imported my opml file from Amphetadesk (which is really quite irksome when you're used to Radio's aggregator.) and we'll see how it goes. Also, worthy of note perhaps is that this is my first post using the MT bookmarklet. So far so good. I had to wrap the copied text in blockquote tags, but other than that this is pretty damn smooth.......
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Although I like the SharpReader interface and concept, I wasn't happy trying to keep things synced between work/home/laptop, much less while traveling and using other computers. Bloglines is pretty fantastic-- my only quibble is that I could REALLY use a nested folder facility!
For the most part, RSS subscriptions have replaced bookmarks in my daily use...
i've been using bloglines for a while now, and i'm sold on it. i love the browser based functionality (no sychronizing home vs. work computers!), and i have been able to manage my subscriptions into nice little packages that work for me. the search feature, and subscription recommendations are also very handy - except i end up being subscribed to far too many feeds - that is probably because of my eternal quest for knowledge, and nothing that i blame on bloglines, though.
Yes, your story is similar to mine. I was using Feed on Feeds, a server-based aggregator, and gave Bloglines a try. It has become my standard. Nevertheless, I am prepared to switch back to FoF or to something else, if the other shoe drops, i.e., Bloglines becomes fee-based or saturated with advertising. I wonder if anyone has considered a distributed-server-based aggregator that uses a BitTorrent approach, whereby each subscriber would help to serve to others the subscriptions he or she read?
Mark Fletcher wrote, a year and a half before launching the blazing fast Bloglines web-based aggregator: "just like fast cars will get you all the chicks, fast Internet services will get you all the users." Well, I've followed in Sam Ruby 's tracks and am...
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I've joined others who are using bloglines these days. It's all the rage. I was using blo.gs but you don't actually read feeds there, you can only check when they've been updated. Everyone using bloglines. Set your subscriptions to public so we can all so who's subscribed to who....
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Hoje fiquei o dia todo sem ler e-mails, e quando abri agora de noite, estavam lá, uns 150 comentários-spam neste blog. Depois de perder uns 10 minutos deletando tudo, resolvi atualizar minha instalação do MT para a nova versão 2.661, que inclui...
This morning a story on RSS newsreaders appeared in the Personal Tech section of my local paper. The title was A simple program to 'refresh' the news; the byline was The Washington Post. I'm keenly interested in how the story of RSS is being told...
The RSS Aggregator Bloglines is starting to build a lot of whuffie on the Web and it's justly deserved. I signed up to Bloglines at the beginning of August 2003 and at the time I raved about the benefits of......
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In the standard WordPress RSS 2.0 Feed, posts can appear in the description and the content:encoded fields. However, by default, anything written in Textile does not get translated in description. SharpReader, my desktop aggregator of choice, is...
Since last fall, I've been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced users. I've...
Sam, BlogBridge is still very much in beta, but it's an interesting hybrid of a nice, rich, user client with an associated online service that uses XML-RPC to keep your favorites and unread marks in synch over multiple computers.
Also the design center for BlogBridge is on people like you (and me) who want to be able to follow lots of feeds in the most efficient way possible.
Bloglines Since last fall, I've been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced...
Bloglines. Since last fall, I've been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced...
Bloglines Since last fall, I've been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced...
Bloglines Since last fall, I've been recommending Bloglines to first-timers as the fastest and easiest introduction to the subscription side of the blogosphere. Remarkably, this same application also meets the needs of some of the most advanced...
Seeing this in my referrer list: Bloglines/2.0 ([link]; 1 subscriber) Apparently means I have one subscriber, according to Mark Pilgrim. Read about this on Richard MacManus' blog. Hello, mum! Or whoever. Referrer logs are cool....
When I moved I redirected all the old feeds – apart from my FeedBurner one – on to the new WordPress ones. My sites full post feed is where I get the bulk of my subscribers – the old URL should be permantently redirected to the new...