10 August 2007

Switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

Ok, I switched. Two things made me jump:

  • Bloglines doesn't understand when changes to posts are significant (e.g. one or two paragraphs added / removed versus single characters fixed here and there after normal spellchecking).
  • I tried to "claim" my feed to use the "Publisher Tools", and it fails to authenticate me to Blogger. From the support forum, this has been an outstanding problem for months, and nobody cares. Ridiculous.

So I proceeded to do the OPML dance and now I'm trying out Reader. First gripe: it doesn't let me rearrange folders in non-alphabetical order. Second gripe: you have to scroll the flipping page, even when it only contains one post, to mark it read while in "expanded" view. I don't understand why they can't launch the JavaScript on display, instead of waiting for the scrolling event. On the plus side, updates seem fast; the "starring" concept is more appealing than Bloglines' "keep new" and (slower) "clipping"; the "sharing" feature could be nice (once I understand exactly how it works). The provided stats are nothing more than novelty, I'd rather have some serious "publisher tool" (eh) without having to switch to flipping FeedBurner.

I've also heard good things about NetVibes, but I hate "boxes" views so I was instantaneously discouraged from trying it. Any other aggregator out there? I'm interested in "same or more features than Bloglines", not in "simple" tools.

Update: I'm also trying NewsGator. So far: very slow, cluttered, "unread" numbers completely made up, and for some reason I'm always subscribed to 100 feeds when Reader tells me it's 101.

(Oh, and I'm trying to tag this post.)

2 comments:

  1. Uhm... now that you have switched, is there a public place to look at your subscriptions as it happened on Bloglines?

    ReplyDelete
  2. well, there are my shared items, for sure... but I don't know how to share the blogroll hierarchy. There must be a way, because you can choose to set the various folders as "public" or private, and mine are all public...

    ReplyDelete