I tried the google newsreader, which is in beta (as a disclaimer), and my initial impressions are sucky! I foolishly loaded a fresh export of my sage rss feader to an opml file, which had 137 or so feeds, and it timed out several times, and was generally slow, though I was very pleased that they did accept imports, and I see they also support exports of your feeds. Sage does limit categories, as far as I know, so my feeds are one long sidebar in firefox, but when there's a new post, it turns the feed name bold, and it doesn't check often enough, but listing by site is key for me, because I have so many, and some are more critical to me (I've gotta BLOG, after all :) ).
Google newsreader shows all posts in a window, that only shows 9, and only increments the number of posts by 20, as you scroll down. You also get the option to sort by relevance or time, but not site! I can't deal with that, the default was relevance, but sorting by time doesn't make it any better. Did I mention it was slow? :)
When I realized how unusable it was for me, I decided to leave a few tech feeds in google newsreader, just to see how it changes, and delete the rest of the subscriptions. I started deleting feeds in firefox [Which you have to do ONE AT A TIME, after hitting edit, then unsubcribe, then wait for the page to be refreshed THEN it reloads your subscriptions], but it wasn't refreshing or working well, and so I decided to try it in IE. This worked better, but one feed for Scot's newsletter wouldn't delete the first 5 times I tried! All the rest were deleted as requested. The reason I am so fired up about it (length of post is one sign of excitement), it tooke me THREE hours to delete over 100 subscriptions. OH MY GOSH!!! Once feeds were deleted, the posts that had been retrieved stayed unread, and listed, I started clicking to mark all as read. When it said 160 of 180 (did I mention it only updates the item count in blocks of 20, as you scroll through?) I gave up, and decided to save y'all from the same pain, if I can. Like Dave Winer says did a human being even look at this???? I'm also planning on trying newsgator and bloglines, as other RSS news aggregators. What news aggregator/RSS news reader do you use?
--MissM (with a very tired clicking finger)
DAMN! thinking about how many clicks it took to clean up the feeds, to a more manageable, in this current interface, 160 + (3*100) = 460! Totally unacceptable!
As Peter said yesterday during the show about calling netgear and informing them of my issues with the SC101, as a public service, I will forward this blog post to the team at google's newsreader.
"I will forward this blog post to the team at google's newsreader."
ReplyDeleteWhoa! I daresay that should rattle the wasps nest and cause some distress.
I'd send them a hardcopy in the post too, as it's far more likely to get read and noticed than a single random email from thousands...
Keep up the good work Mister Crusader!
Well, I don't have such a large number of feeds to keep track of. I only have 5 I want to track. So, instead of using a real news feed reader, I just log into google personal web page. I can arrange the page by dragging the parts on the page. I get headlines and my e-mail notices at the same time. I tried free FeedReader software. It worked fine for me. But I don't really need it for my purposes.
ReplyDeleteKen
ksn
nobby, good advice! and Thanks for the comment! But, its Miss or Ms. Crusader ;)
ReplyDeleteken, I like how google's personalized home page allows rss feeds, also. I keep one dear friend's blog on my personalized page, but with the volume of feeds I subscribe to, I don't think that having them all on a web page, suits me. Thanks for commenting!!