To be able to tote subscription/read status between machines and OSes, I’ve switched (mostly) from using a desktop feed aggregator to using the web-based ones. So far, I haven’t found one I’m really happy with.
- Bloglines:
The good: single-key navigation too all unread posts. Nice Presentation.
The bad: keeps re-showing already read posts. A lot. Mark all items read in a feed as soon as you click on it, even if you didn’t scroll all the way down the 75 new items (hello, Planet Intertwingly).
- Google Reader:
Pretty much the inverse of the above two. I can’t believe there isn’t a better way to move to the next unread feed with the keyboard other than shift-N shift-P to move up and down the feed list and shift-O to open. There has to be a better way. The ability to star posts is nice, it’s much easier than posting to delicious and forgetting about it.
Any suggestions? Have I missed something on either one?
Right now I’m using GReader but the keyboard nav is driving me up the wall.
I mostly like bloglines and have been using it for several months. As far as I can tell, the problem of seeing already read posts is solvable by going into “Edit Subscription” for a feed which has this problem and setting “Updated Items” to Ignore instead of Display as New. It seems that some blogs either emit buggy feeds, or show a item as updated every time somebody leaves a comment on it.
(I was forced to not use bloglines for craigslist though because they seem to have some stupid “too many requests from one IP” limit, which is inevitable when you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search you do.)
I use a hacked-up version of rss2email that delivers to local Maildirs so I can use my mail reader of choice (web-based or not).
The other benefit is that it looks like you’re working when you’re catching up on your RSS feeds.