Bloglines
I tried Bloglines earlier this year but I didn't fall for it. I also tried several other online and offline systems but I always went back to SharpReader.
I decided to give Bloglines another chance on my Christmas vacation as I did not bring my PC (it's a vacation after all:-) Bloglines imported my OPML file from SharpReader without problems and organized my blogs like I was used to in a tree view.
As my blogroll has grown I appreciate Bloglines a lot more. It has several great features:
- It is good for reading blogs that has a lot of noise any only have a new items you care about. The alternate background of the blog items works very well so it's fast to skip to the next item.
- I can easily catch up with an entire group of feeds by selecting the parent folder in the treeview. Great for groups of feeds with few posts.
- The "clip/blog" feature is great for keeping track of items I want to blog about or read later. I clipped some items before I left that I'll have a look at during my vacation
- By default it links open in new windows
- It keeps RSS traffic down to bandwidth challenged people like myself. Bloglines checks the feeds once an hour for all users whereas normal RSS clients check each feed individually. Click the 'sub bloglines' icon above to subscribe to this feed with Bloglines.
- It is free
The only drawback is that it only works online. It is not a big problem as most blog entries point to something that I have to be online to read anyway.
Looks like a winter storm is heading my way so I'll have some time to catch up with my feeds (unless the power goes out again).
Bloglines is great, no question. Also, Skweezer (my company's service that you just reviewed in the previous post) is not too shabby either. However, use both together on your PDA or phone (that is, browse Bloglines through Skweezer), and you have an altogether extremely cool mobile experience. While Bloglines aggregates all the headlines that you care about and saves you bandwidth, Skweezer has you covered once you click on the link to read the entire article. Peanut butter and jelly, my friend. Cool site, by the way.
ReplyDeleteThe Skweezer Bloglines integration is impressive. I did not think that it would work well due to the frames.
ReplyDeleteI have one blocking problem when I use the Pocket PC though: save to clippings does not work. I get to the page where I see the title and the URL but nothing happens when I click Save.
Any chance it will get fixed?