I’ve been playing around with some alternatives to Bloglines over the Christmas period. In summary, although many of them offer advanced features, none of them works as well for me as Bloglines does. I made by habitual hopeful return to Newsgator, and tried Rojo out properly for the first time. I also fired up Feeddemon again, as it used to be my feedreader of choice.
In general I’m not a big fan of frames in web pages, but the 2 pane interface of Bloglines suits how I read – allowing me to scroll down all of the feed content, and then moving to the next feed without having to scroll back up. Such a small sounding thing, but it turned out to be the single biggest deciding factor for me.
Newsgator and Rojo have some advanced features – recommended feeds, item rating, item flagging, attempts to show relevant stories, story sharing amongst one’s social network, item level tagging, etc. Didn’t use any of these features in anger – and to be honest I’m not sure I agree with the seemingly monolithic nature of these services – I’d rather use Bloglines, Greasemonkey and del.icio.us to share items of interest, either with other people (eg a social network), or with myself (for later blogging or other use).
I still like Feeddemon – and if I was always in one place using one machine I think I could go back to it – but (and this might make you laugh), I actually feel guilty using it just to read feeds ! So many options to tinker with, Watches and News Bins to set up, styles to play around with – I should be doing more than simply reading stuff shouldn’t I ? Bloglines doesn’t make me feel like I have to do anything more than read (and occasionally post something to del.cio.us) if I want to.
Blogjet has been the posting client I’ve used most over the last year or so, and on the way I’ve tried lots – ecto, w.bloggar, flock, and numerous others that I’ve forgotten about.
I’ve been trying out performancing over the last week or so, and while it has some good points (being integrated into Firefox is good, although Blogjet is only a right-click away), but the formatting seems totally hit and miss, I can’t seem to find a way of adding technorati tags without them appearing twice, and the current lack of trackbacks is a show-stopper. So – one to watch, but not a replacement for Blogjet yet.
Technorati tags: aggregator, posting, newsgator, bloglines, rojo, blogjet, performancing,
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