Recently in RSS Readers Category

I installed this optimized google reader script to give more screen real estate. This means it is now possible to read all the comics properly in the 1024*768 screen resolution that I'm stuck with. Wahey!

Google Reader launched yesterday and I've just had a quick play with it this morning. It choked on my initial import of my opml feed from feed on feeds, but that is because the description field in the exported data did not end with a set of double quotes if the descriptions were more than 3 lines long (for some very strange reason). I edited the file and started the import and now have lots of feeds in google reader. I'm not sure if I like the interface or not yet as it doesn't load up feeds with old items, instead you just get new data so I don't have a lot of feed items to read through. However I have found that clickable links in feeds do not appear in the google page so you have to load the original source (which is a bit pants really) Hmmm looked like that was just that one particular blog - (under the stairs) as others seem to be working ok now.

I've just come across gregarius which is another self hosted web based rss reader. This one looks pretty good and includes a decent search facility. It's an alternative to feedonfeeds. I'm not sure which one I prefer at the moment. Although gregarius looks nice, has ajax for its user interface it seems to be a bit slow and the read/unread methods are clunky.
You can get unread messages in a view but unlike fof there are a lot of clicks needed to mark certain posts as read. With FOF I used to view all unread posts and if I had to stop reading due to time constraints then I'd click the link which said "select all to here" which would select all the posts from the top of the page to where I had clicked and then a "mark as read" button would be clicked and all those posts would disappear from the unread view and I'd be left with the rest to read when I next got some time.
With Gregarius it looks like you have to either have all unread posts marked as read or individually select each post to be read by clicking on the edit icon, clearing the unread checkbox and then checking ok. Repeat for 100 posts and thats a lot of clicking!
Update I have the double click plugin installed now but thats still a lot of clicking and you have to watch you dont click on a hyperlink within the body (which could be a pain if the entire body is hyperlinked such as in photostreams.
Be warned that an import of opml will overwrite any existing feeds that you have in gregarius!

I've changed my RSS feed this morning due to a couple of new features that Feedburner have released. They spent thursday adding new features to Feedburner to celebrate to their last day in their old office (most people would have spent the day moving furniture!) One of the features is the ability to geotag an RSS feed so the absoblogginlutely feedburner feed now has the general location from my zipcode added. I'm not sure which rss readers will use this information but I'm sure it won't be long before aggregators start to add this functionality in. I've also removed my flickr feed from automatically being included as I don't always want my flickr photos included in this website feed so you may want to subscribe to my flickr photos here

Another way of adding an RSS feed to FeedOnFeeds is to use the LiveLines 0.4.3 extension. This allows you to click on the RSS icon in the status bar and add it to your web based reader. Also supports Bloglines and other desktop aggregators.

I still don't get the benefit of using bloglines, but maybe that is because I'm using someone elses aggregation of feeds. If I look at Mikes main website I can see his clips on the right hand side - this is the first page I'm looking at.
If there is an item that looks interesting I click on it which takes me to the second page containing three links on the right hand side.
The first link, larger than the rest and in bold is actually a link to the current page that I'm on (and therefore rather pointless and confusing).
The second link has the same anchor text as the previous link but actually links to the post that Mike is referring to - this is the link that I need.
The third link points to the same place as the second link but contains the text "source blog" which again seems to be redundant as I know that from the second link.
When I click on either of the last two links it finally takes me through to the content - 2 pages after the initial link (and this is meant to make things easier to track?)

So, having whinged, what would I do to "fix" this?

1. Loose the first titled link as it is just too confusing and redundant.


2. Drop the third link or change the text so it gives the name of the blog/website that you are quoting (and possibly linking to the home page rather than the individual item).

Anyone else having problems with feedster? I've been trying to claim my blog but as it won't let me log in with my username and password it is a bit difficult to do. If I put in my email address (which is not my login id) then the new password gets sent and I can read it, but when I put it into the form it tells me that the username/password is incorrect. Emails to the feedback contact don't get answered.
Then this morning I went to check and found that my feed has been deleted at the request of the user - huh????? The only thing I've done is changed my default feed on the web page, but the old feed still gets published and I didn't explicitly ask for it to be deleted. grrrrr

I changed my rss feed location to Absoblogginlutely on feedburner as this should hopefully reduce the amount of traffic that I use, I only need to provide 1 feed, flickr photos can be included and I also get an easier method to track stats and clickthroughs from the feeds. You the user, should not see that much of a difference. At the moment I have not put in redirects for my current feeds, so current subscribers will use my feeds, new subscribers will get the feedburner feed.
I've also signed up for a gravatar with a new email address so expect to see that on your blog comments soon and I'll soon be adding the plugin to this site for comments.

Willy Morin posted his stylesheet for Feed On Feeds, the (web based) rss reader that I use. However his files were uploaded in some weird compression routine so I've reloaded them up as a zip file which can be downloaded here.
As I also use the non frames version I edited the css slightly and saved it as fof.css in the fof directory (as well as keeping his download in the frames directory). The edits I made are in the extended entry.

FeedOnFeeds 1.3 has been released. The best thing about this version is that it has a "mark all read that i've actually read" feature. In other words each item has a mark read above this item so that if you are really busy and have to go and do some work instead of reading your feeds, you can click to mark all the items above the current one, and then click mark as read. That way all the ones below the current item are still unread. Without this feature you ended up reading the same item a couple of times as you tried to catch up with your feeds.
I put again in the subject as I seem to have already downloaded 1.3 in the past.

Scoble blogged about SauceReader.
Sauce reader - looks really neat. As the program was launched it ran through a quick tutorial - and then crashed with a "can't load resource" error message. A quick reload of the application later and it was working. This utility also uses internet explorer as its browser engine :-( but has integration with w.bloggar (which you can use to "blog this") or you can use its built in blog this facility - with the choice of which blog you want to use.
The autodetection of feeds works fine on my website although its not that obvious that it has detected a feed - the subscribe button becomes available but thats the only indication you get. Other readers tend to say "hey i've found a feed - do you want to subscribe?". This is quite handy although can get annoying if they do this every time you visit a web page.
one bug i've seen is that if you hit the back button on the browser bar it actually moves the active browser window back - NOT the browser window within Sauce reader. Unfortunately for me, this meant it moved back on the MT popup window that I was writing this review in - and I almost lost it all. Thankfully I was able to get back to the data I had typed in!

ToolButton - your content pipeline was promoted in a recent freetechmail newsletter which has autorss discovery, a search bar on the desktop, mouse gestures and more bookmark functionality. Sounds good, its free and downloading to my machine as we speak - might be a useful addition to my limited ie browsing.

Rocketinfo.com - A Free Personal Web-based RSS News Reader looks quite good. Pencils you might want to sign up for this just so you can see what RSS is all about.

Got Angela's atom feed into the latest version of feed on feed. Now I no longer have to rely on a third party (voidstar) to provide the feed.

Lysozyme talks about bloglines providing email to rss feeds along with mailbucket. Bloglines is handy if you've already got an account with them, but mailbucket is better as you can just think up an email address @mailbucket.org when you want to create an rss feed for a newsletter. The only problem with this sort of thing is if everyone decides to subscribe to Langalist (for example) then there could be several rss feeds at mailbucket.org all for the same newsletter. The disadvantage is also that the list is public, so anyone could unsubscribe the feed, whereas at bloglines it is under your control.

I finally got round to installing mobilerss as mentioned previously on the Axim. The import of my 97 feed opml file went well and the page was set up in avantgo easily enough. The only problem is that it comes down as several html pages as opposed to content in a database, so there is no "unread" messages capability, which is a shame as I've really got used to it in other rss readers. I think what I might do is set up my new feeds page from FeedOnFeed to be synched with avantgo instead.

The software was on the pc for 5 minutes then I realised a new version was released whilst I was on holiday so I downloaded and installed that. I tried to import my opml file but it just tells me that there were some errors on the subscription and then doesn't subscribe to any of the feeds. No log file can be found so i don't know why it failed so I can't troubleshoot and fix it :-( Email sent to the developers, who don't have a support forum, so we'll see how long they take to respond.

Intravnews looks like a good (free) rss aggregator that integrates with outlook. I'll have to try this one out next week.

Cracked the problem with Feed on Feed not detecting gotdotnet blogs and posted the one (simple) line change to the Feed on Feed forum along with a suggestion on what to look for with radio pages so they could also be autodetected. That would take a bit more work but I reckon I could do it....someday.

Added Feed on Feeds to my website to have my own RSS reader hosted on my server. This works like Bloglines but has the advantage that its hosted on your own server (requires Mysql/PHP) so not relying on a third party. I'm just trying to get it to work as a cronjob but can't find the location for get on my hasweb hosting.

Bloglines looks like a decent web based newsreader which means its available from any pc and you don't need to mess with synchronising your feeds between computers, although an opml file helps with that (which I imported from Awasu)

I've been using Awasu a bit more recently. I tend to keep (or rather have to switch) to the Unread Posts filter option so that it only displays all posts I've not read yet. Its a bit annoying that you have to click on the sitefeed on the left, pane and then scroll down the top right pain to view the contents of the feed.

I've been using Awasu a bit more recently. I tend to keep (or rather have to switch) to the Unread Posts filter option so that it only displays all posts I've not read yet. Its a bit annoying that you have to click on the sitefeed on the left, pane and then scroll down the top right pain to view the contents of the feed.