RSS Comments
376 words
Since I lost patience with Bloglines, I’ve tried a few desktop RSS
aggregators. Neither is perfect.
The first is Sharpreader. This
is a Windows application based on the .Net framework. it’s the first .Net
application I’ve installed, which is quite scary in itself.
Sharpreader does much of what I’d expect: It presents your feeds in a
heirarchy. Unread items show in a bold font. New items pop up from your
system tray, just like an new mail notification.
Sharpreader has a nice feature whereby items which refer to each other
appear below each other in the tree, so you can see just how incestuous
the blogging community you monitor really is.
A serious oversight is that there does not appear to be a “go to next
unread” function. In Thunderbird, for example, I can view all unread mail
or news items by just hitting “n” repeatedly.
Sharpreader has another serious problem, which is that it seems to have
trouble reading large documents from some kinds of network — including
my home wireless network. My guess is that this is to do with the network’s
MTU, but that is purely based on some empirical tests. On such networks,
many feeds fail, with the document truncated, and Sharpreader rejecting
the entire feed as a result. Worse, when you return to a wired network,
Sharpreader requests the feed again, using HTTP’s “if-modified-since” header,
and the date of the previous failure. The server correctly replies “no change”,
so you won’t see the contents of that feed until it is updated.
The author of Sharpreader has not responded to my bug reports.
The second piece of software I tried is Sage. Sage is a plugin for Mozilla Firefox.
Rather nicely, Sage tiles the articles from a feed across a browser pane, so
you can scan them all, or pick one to view it in its proper HTML form. I’ve
just updated Sage, and one missing element has been added: “mark all as read”.
This only works for one feed at a time however.
Sage doesn’t have an obvious “next unread” feature either. The other
irritating thing about Sage is that if a folder is collapsed, there’s no
way to see whether it contains unread items.
So, no ideal RSS reader yet. Any suggestions as to what to try next?
The “live bookmarks” feature of Firefox doesn’t suit my needs, and
Thunderbird’s RSS support needs to mature a bit before it’s suitable for me.