manalang

Sam Ruby just converted to a server-side news aggregator called Bloglines. I like the idea behind server-side news aggregators, and I think that Bloglines is a good implementation of one. However, after trying it out, I still prefer the RSS Reader Panel extension that’s available for Firefox. I prefer it mainly because it offers me a simple way to scan which articles and sites have been updated right from within the browser. I also like it’s small form factor which promotes users to actually visit the website the article or entry originated from instead of reading an entire article in an aggregator. In the RSS Reader Panel, to see the summary of an article, all I have to do is hover over the titles to see a summary description in a tooltip control. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.

The RSS Reader Panel has a lot of nice features like the ability to import/export an OPML file, integrated Feedster search, Atom feed support, CSS based display of a feed, and the ability to have the browser check for updates to feeds. I think Bloglines is off to a great start, but I think in order to get my vote, Bloglines should offer a sidebar panel that functions much the same way as the RSS Reader panel — the biggest differentiator being that Bloglines is server based.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2004 at 6:05 AM PST and is tagged with blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.