Given my irritations with Bloglines, which have been shared by others, I have been testing some other readers - most notably Google Reader and BlogBridge. I really, really want something web-based. While BlogBridge is a local program that needs to be installed, one can syndicate their feeds so that they have access to them from different computers. It is ok (although I find it quite slow), but part of me is just comfortable with Bloglines, and I wish I didn’t have to switch. Google Reader is getting better and I think I may end up going with it simply because it is web-based without any additional installs.
For a while, it seemed as if feeds were updating quicker in Bloglines. However, it is still inconsistent. It has been over 24 hours since my feed for this blog was updated in my Bloglines account - and I have written 4 posts today. This is extremely frustrating. I have no idea of how many other feeds are affected - especially given the inconsistent nature of this problem. Anyway, I’ve decided to make the switch. I am a bit sad, but figure soon enough I will get as used to something else as I did to Bloglines.
December 5, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Hey Jennifer-
Yeah, I was really very comfortable with the Bloglines interface, too- and if it didn’t have such an awful time keeping up, wild horses couldn’t have made me switch.
It only took about a week to start to feel at home in Google Reader, which is constantly improving. There are two Firefox plugins for Google Reader that have significantly enhanced my enjoyment of it, and I detailed them here:
http://davidrothman.net/2006/12/03/two-more-ways-to-trick-out-google-reader/
I still don’t like the Google Reader interface as much as I liked Bloglines’, but I find it a worthwhile trade-off to get updates in a timely fashion. Besides, I’m hopeful Google Reader will continue to improve the interface.
Best,
-David
December 8, 2006 at 2:23 am
Jennifer. I’m one of the guys with BlogBridge. Sorry you find it slow, but just wanted to mention that we recently (less than a week ago) released 4.0 which has substantial speed improvements. If that’s what you were using, then, hmm, I’d be interested (if you care to share) what platform and config you are on. If you can find a minute, it would be great to have a quick email exchange so we can make BlogBridge better - also you might be interested in a new feature that we have in our new development release “Post to Blog” to let you directly .. post to your blog.. from BlogBridge which is a big productivity enhancer. Anyway, FWIW.
December 10, 2006 at 11:10 am
Hello Jennifer.
Did you try Newsgator ?
From a librarian in Brussels, Belgium