May 10, 2004

RSS Aggregators

Lately I've been trying out a couple of RSS feed aggregators. And wow! they seem like they'll be very helpful. I had wondered how some people seemed to read the scores of blogs in their blogroll.

For you uninitiated folks, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." Basically, a website (such as this one) produces an XML feed, which is a code that contains details like when the new post was published, the article title, and an excerpt of the body. Yahoo! News has several news feeds, and any site made by Movable Type automatically creates one. What the aggregator does is to read several websites' XML feeds on a regular basis and informs you when they've been updated. More importantly, it gives you the headline, so you know whether or not the article interests you.

Anyway, I've been trying out two RSS Aggregators. The first is Stardock's Blog Navigator, and the other is BlogMatrix Jäger. Right now, I think that BlogMatrix is getting my vote, partially for it's easier importation of blogs/sites and partially because of it's cool interface. Instead of trying to cram a browser into the software, this program just sits on the side of the screen, displaying links. On the other hand, it's a little more cumbersome to get "old" articles to be listed; it only seems to show the most recent articles, whereas Blog Navigator seems to keep them listed somewhere. Also, Blog Navigator is supposed to be able to save the posts to the hard drive ahead of time and let the user browse them later, a la AvantGo.

Does anyone use a different program that you'd recommend?

UPDATE: DoH! Just found the "All Weblogs" button at the bottom of the BlogMatrix program. That helps!

Posted by Blog Jones at May 10, 2004 01:07 AM | Category: Technology

Comments

I've tried a few different ones, but my favorite thus far is Bloglines.

Loads quickly. Easy to use. I subscribe to 85 blogs right now, and I can't keep up with them all, but Bloglines certainly helps.

Posted by: Robert S. at May 11, 2004 10:19 AM

Thanks for giving it a try. I personally subscribe to about 250 blogs without too much of a time drag on my life.

There's a 1.1 Beta version out now, so if you're looking for new features, send me an e-mail.

Posted by: David at May 19, 2004 09:20 AM
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've had to close comments on this entry. Sorry. Spammers ruin it for everybody. If you really, really want to add a comment to this entry, email me.