Thursday, March 17, 2005

Bloglines vs FeedonFeeds

So I've been using an RSS Aggregator called FeedonFeeds for a long time now. The reason I've always liked it is that it is server based and caches the data in a MySQL DB. I have it installed on the Fedora box at home and can connect to it via the DSL connection from anywhere. So I have one centralised location for all my feeds. The caching is also handy as I found a lot of the older aggregators would only cache the titles and not any of the content, and for sites that turnover their RSS links quickly, a lot of the items used to be gone by the time I'd try to read them. But it ain't very pretty and as I've added a lot of feeds recently, the lack of grouping is killing me.

I searched around a bit and found Bloglines. Did a quick export-import of the OPML file and was up and running in no time. After a few days use, I'm nearly a convert. Groupings work brilliantly and I have now discovered the joy of a ClipBlog (always wondered what the hell Scoble was talking about). Mine is here. I think it also lists all of my feeds. Obviously it doesn't include links to Iguana Fetish Monthly but everything else should be there. Gosh this WorldWideInterWeb thingy is jolly useful isn't it?

Now what I would like is a free RSS Aggregator that uses the Web-Services provided by Bloglines so I have a nice client side tool accessing the server-side data. I know FeedDemon does it but that costs. Anyone?

2 comments:

marcas said...

Don't know if you've come across any other RSS readers yourself yet, but I found this list on the premium section of the Irish Times site (I'm in Holland, it's my home page, it's more than worth it!):

Windows
AmphetaDesk
Feed Reader
RssReader
SharpReader
Mac
NewsFire
AmphetaDesk
Linux
AmphetaDesk
Blam
Liferea
Straw

Online news aggregator
Bloglines
Feedster
My Yahoo

Conor said...

Yeah, I've checked most of the client-side ones out over the past year but the main problem is exactly that - they are client based, so you don't have location independence. With feedonfeeds or Bloglines, I can see the same set of feeds (and the same read/unread status) no matter what machine (or OS) I am using. Feedemon tools can integrate with Bloglines but it ain't free. If I had the time, this would be the perfect opportunity to do something useful with the Bloglines web-services interface and hook it into one of the opensource tools. But I won't.........