Comments on: RSS feed reader comparo

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:04:01 +0000

Ancestor: Thanks for your comments! I'm using FeedDemon these days (actually, I tried it first after that post and have used it since), but I'll leave your comments up there for anyone else that happens by here.

By: Ancestor

Ancestor — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:44:16 +0000

s/disclaimer/disclosure… Duh!

By: Ancestor

Ancestor — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:26:24 +0000

Regarding Brief, keep in mind that it’s a very young extension. As a matter of fact, your post is dated just a week after its initial release.

As for the specific issues you were having, you can mark entire feeds as read (there’s a toolbar button which you must have missed). You can also collapse folders by double-clicking them. The performance is already better than it used to be and it’s still being worked on.

Even though Brief is much less popular than Sage, it isn’t going to fade into obscurity anytime soon. Quite the contrary: Brief is actively developed and thriving, while Sage hasn’t been improved apart from bugfixes for almost two years, which is a shame.

(Disclaimer: I’m the author of Brief :)

By: ScottC

ScottC — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 13:42:37 +0000

In Brief, to mark an entire feed as read, right-click the feed in the left pane and select “Mark Feed As Read”. I had become addicted to RSS when IE7 came along, then I realized what a pig IE7 is. Firefox is much quicker.

I only have 50 feeds or so now, and performance hasn’t been an issue for me.

By: bunnyhero

bunnyhero — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:02:17 +0000

i used to use newsgator but like you found it way too slow. i don’t like bloglines because last time i tried it, it couldn’t interleave blog posts by time like an LJ friends page (which newsgator can do, but when that option is turned it, it’s even slower!). i’m with you on sidebar-apps like sage: it’s there no matter what tab you switch to, bleah.

now i’m on google reader and am generally very happy with it, since it’s fast and does the time-merge thing, despite some glitches and bugs. but if the google UI is not to your taste then i guess it’s not an option. “feel” is such a personal thing but oh-so-important.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:09:03 +0000

mathew: There’s something about Google’s design elements and UI that just doesn’t sit right with me. Can’t put my finger on it, but all of Calendar, GMail, and Google Reader grate on me really quickly.

By: mathew

mathew — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:36:42 +0000

Wot no Google Reader?

By: Dossy Shiobara

Dossy Shiobara — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:20:09 +0000

I started to write an IMAP-to-Bloglines “proxy” which uses the Bloglines Sync API to expose your feeds as IMAP folders. This way, I could use Thunderbird to pull my Bloglines subscriptions, then click “Work offline” and take all my articles offline with me.

I didn’t get far enough with this to stop using the Bloglines web interface, but I at least got enough working to prove that the concept is possible.

Perhaps I could/should start this as an open source project–if other interested parties would contribute, it might actually get finished.

By: rik

rik — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:53:50 +0000

I’m a Sage user. I just open it every so often, tell it to update, read, and then close it again. It seems to work as a workflow for me.

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:46:48 +0000

Paul: Hrm, thanks. I tried that last night to no avail, but maybe I misidentified the problem: if I try to subscribe to

http://nyxie.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest

I get the usual “add feed” form, but if I try to subscribe to

http://mendel:MYPASSWORD@nyxie.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest

I get “No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.” Without being able to see what’s happening at either the Bloglines http client or LiveJournal end, I’m not sure where to begin to debug it. I’ll drop you guys a line via the contact form.