A big time-sucker lately has been Bloglines. I’ve been trying to find a reasonable RSS reader for the last few weeks. I had been using Syndirella ever since downloading the opml file containing poker blogs from Up for Poker. I after using it for months, I gave up on it as a reader for three reasons: 1) it was no longer being developed, 2) it was a memory hog that crashed my machine, and 3) is was windows only. So set out looking for alternatives. I think that Mozilla/Firefox will eventually come up with a killer RSS aggregator, but the emerging plugins/apps are not ready for primetime yet. That left me with either a Java app or a web app. I tried a couple of the Java apps and found them to be… Java apps. Clunky. Don’t get me started on the state of Java desktop applications, most of which are terribly unusable. So I tried Bloglines and, so far, I’ve been impressed. I’m interested to see the results of the recent opening up of their api.
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There is nothing in the last couple of posts about how beautiful I am. weird.
Blogines rules. The real upside is that you can get it anywhere, no special software needed. The other real upside is that ultimately centralized aggregators like this reduce overall traffic and reduce the load on your server.
Firefox PR1 has built in RSS reading. Thunderbird also has it built in now.
Actually, the most compelling thing to me about bloglines is how their API is being integrated *into* desktop aggregators. Which seems weird, since you’d think they’d be in competition with desktop tools.
So now, you can create a bloglines account, build your blogroll, read it in a browser, AND access all of this from desktop apps that are bloglines-compatible (FeedDemon, etc). Now, that’s cool.