intertwingly

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.