Since I’ve been having numerous troubles with Bloglines as of late, I’ve begun looking at feed reader alternatives. However, I’m running into one major snafu. I’m too used to the way Bloglines functions. I can handle another interface, but when I read my feeds, I like to read them a certain way.
- I only want to see the feeds with updates.
- I prefer to only see the headlines, then visit the site if interested.
- After clicking on a feed and seeing what’s new, it should be marked as read.
- When I’m done reading through my feeds, I like an unread count of zero. That doesn’t mean I clicked and read everything, it just means that I saw the headline at least.
At the moment, I have not been able to find a feed reader which replicates this functionality. Since most people tend to hate the way Bloglines functions, I have a feeling I have different feed reading habits. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just makes it a pain to find an alternative.
I’m curious, what are your feed reading habits? If you use / have used Bloglines, are there any alternatives you like? For me, Newsfire has come to closest to the functionally I want. Beyond that, I can’t really find anything else I like. I guess I’m just going to have to change my habits somehow, because I just can’t stand Bloglines anymore.
8 Comments
Try Google Reader (http://reader.google.com). The river of news concept is fantastic, especially since version 2.0 of Google Reader was released.
I switched from Bloglines and never could be happier. New features are added all the time, there is no real noticeable bugs, it is fast, and makes it really easy to go through a bunch of new items without breaking a sweat. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are really awsome.
Example: I basically went through 400+ unread items in probably 20-25 minutes.
Try it!
I actually don’t use a feed reader. My reading habits are so scatterbrained that a feed reader doesn’t work for me. I just bookmark everything. I’m boring.
Chris, I’ve found Google suffers the problem of keeping things unread. Like I said, I prefer headlines only, and Google’s view for that does not make things as read without viewing them. To top of it, Google does not allow easy access to the actual articles without clicking links in weird places.
The Newsgator desktop app, NetNewsWire, is pretty sweet.
My Feed habits are pretty much as you describe, though I scan the headlines and if something catches my eye I read the summary. If I’m still interested I visit the site.
I second the NetNewsWire recommendation. It shows all feeds all the time but the updated feeds are color coded and keyboard shortcuts make scanning only through the updates easy. A hit of the [return] key opens the site in the background while I continue scanning the feeds. The summary pane can be closed if you just want the headlines. Each item is marked read on select. The entire feed can be marked read with a keyboard shortcut.
I’ve never used Newsfire. I only hear good things about it but its gui is to visually distracting for my tastes.
@Ronald, ‘mark all as read’ still works even in that view.
@ Chris, yep I couldn’t go back to anything else, I second your review entirely.
As for feed reading habits: quick, go, go, go, try and keep up, damn, another new batch comes in…
Someone told me recently that after a few weeks of holiday their feeds stood at 100+ I replied: mine are at 100+ every day, all the day, even when I’m rushing through them. Cut down a bit maybe?
Well, I decided I’m moving to Newsfire. After some playing around with it, I have it setup in a way which I like. I’m also learning the shortcuts to mark things as read, so it’s not as bad as I thought. I’d still like suggestions if anyone has them, so keep em coming.
Would you care to give BlogBridge a try? It’s cross-platform, offers various list views and allows you to maintain dynamic OPML files to which others can subscribe: you change the OPML, they’ll be informed.
Another feature that most BlogBridge users appreciate a lot is the easy way to create a SmartFeed across all (or some) of your feeds and to rate feeds using one to five stars.
BlogBridge has an option to consider all articles from a feed as read once you move the focus to another feed, I’d call this the automatic mode. Of course there’s also a manual mode.
My connection to BlogBridge is that I use it to maintain several reading lists related to RSS technology to which people can subscribe.
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