Why Bloglines sucks

[skyfaller]

I just realized that I hate Bloglines, and at the same time why I hate Bloglines. It is because Bloglines is like e-mail! I *hate* e-mail!

With Bloglines, just like e-mail, if you do not read a blog post, it just *sits* there in your "inbox." I *hate* my inbox! I still have this incredible e-mail backlog that goes back to last summer, and insufficient time & motivation to clean it out, I'm considering just deleting everything more than 6 months old so that I don't have to look at it anymore.

I suppose that I can "clean out" my Bloglines "inbox" by clicking the root folder (which currently says "46 feeds"). That will mark all unread blog posts read. Unfortunately, the resulting webpage that it serves up sorts the posts by which blog they came from, not by the time it they posted, so I can't just glance at the latest few posts to get a sense of what is going on and then get back to my work.

Kinja is better, but still not adequate. Why not? Because it doesn't provide the full text of each entry, even for blogs that provide the full entry in their RSS feed. You can only view summaries.

All I want is something like my LJ friends' list, except for things outside of Livejournal. Is that really so much to ask?

I suppose I could try installing my own copy of Planet somewhere, but surely that's overkill. There has to be a free service that does this somewhere out there.

Comments

FeedTagger

[(Anonymous)]

... maybe you want to try something like feedtagger?

http://www.feedtagger.com/

feedlounge

[firasd.livejournal.com]

You need to get a 'real' site (php/mysql/python/&c), then I'd hook you up with planetplanet :)

Or just hold out for http://feedlounge.com/ to get out of beta.

[danielle5985.livejournal.com]

why not write your own?

[jmendl.livejournal.com]

What's your email strategy? I usually just mark things as unread if I haven't responded to them. Then I go through a year later and it's too late to respond to most stuff. :) Though there are always a few good old emails left. I think I need a new client though; one with flags; that makes it a lot easier to deal with things.

Re: FeedTagger

[skyfaller]

No, that doesn't seem to fit my description of "an LJ friends list for things outside of LJ"... I just want to see 15-20 of the latest posts scrolling by, sorted by time of posting, not the blog they originated from.

[rbeef.livejournal.com]

JWZ, in his page for Portalizer (http://www.jwz.org/cheesegrater/) (which might do what you want) seems to say that LiveJournal itself does this. He links here. (http://www.livejournal.com/syn/)

I use NetNewsWire, personally.

[skyfaller]

Livejournal does allow you to check feeds from outside of LJ, but only certain ones that people have set up bridges for. And I don't really want to mix those in with my LJ friends list, anyway.

Using a centralized RSS service like Bloglines is better for the internet, because it only fetches the RSS feeds once, then deals them out to thousands of people... if everyone used an RSS reader on their computer, the RSS pings would seriously increase traffic, because of the silly way the designers of RSS tried to make the pull model of web browsing support pushing content out to people. Really the web sites should inform everyone when they've been updated, rather than waiting for RSS readers to ask them... but if you use a centralized RSS reader, then it helps fix this problem.

[rbeef.livejournal.com]

NetNewsWire can actually read RSS feeds through your Bloglines account, but that makes subscription management difficult, since you need to add or remove feeds from two places.

A better response, I think is that bandwidth is cheap. If nothing has changed, you get an HTTP 304.

If you're really concerned, though, run your feeds through Coral (http://www.coralcdn.org/).

[lshmael.livejournal.com]

It is browser-based, as opposed to living on a website, but Sage ( http://sage.mozdev.org ) might work for your needs.