December 07, 2004

Curious George: Online Newsreaders? Kottke's latest post reminded me that I need a newsreader for RSS feeds. I would prefer an online www-based one so I could set it up once and access it from home and work.

Right now I use the my yahoo portal. You insert portlets for each feed and specify how many entries to display, links or descriptions, etc. But it's ugly and has very few features. I want filtering and image display, and I want to be able to merge several feeds into one section. And I want a better layout. (Obviously it'll have ads, but if it just has google ads, that'd be the bees knees.) Basically I want something as close to "gmail for RSS feeds" as possible. Any suggestions, personal experiences?

posted by smallish bear 20 years ago
  • Personally, I use Livejournal, mostly because I can create my own style for viewing them. I've heard an awful lot of good things about Bloglines.
  • Bloglines. It's a bit slow sometimes (not unlike gmail) but otherwise does what you want. Also, it's much easier to find feeds in Bloglines than in Livejournal.
  • Thank you! I can't believe I've never heard of this before. *hangs head in e-shame*
  • I also vote for Bloglines. By the way, does anyone know if there is a good freeware or cheap RSS reader for Nokia Symbian phones?
  • doesn't yahoo also have something like that?
  • Yeah, I just started using Bloglines and while I wish I could find a service which represents the site by the CSS on the site (with comments), this is the best we can do for free right now, I suppose.
  • Really? I like that it strips all of the crappy fonts and layouts and I can just concentrate on actually reading, you know, the text.
  • I use Feed on Feeds, though I've been itching to write my own aggregator for a while now. It ain't rocket science.
  • Any word on feedster? I found it when a search for the memepool feed turned up their RSS search service. I like the clean interface. (btw, I'm still looking for a memepool feed that's kept up-to-date. Help?)
  • Aside from the fact that it's completely fucked that is. Does anyone else use feedster? Is it always broken or are they just having problems today?
  • OK, I'm getting into bloglines now and it's pretty good. Although I want to fix their CSS files so bad... They actually use CSS to push things off the edge of the window, so it screws up the word wrap. On IE5.5 anyway. I'll see how it works on firefox when I get home. I'd love to write my own. I'm pretty good with php, xml, CSS, js, etc. Everything I'd need to make one just how I want it. But honestly, right now I'd rather play WOW. Oh well.
  • Ok Bloglines just ate all my goddamn feeds. Is anyone else having problems with bloglines today or is it just me? Again, I'm open to any other suggestions. wikipedia is great (as usual) but it doesn't tell me which ones are good and which ones blow ass.
  • Hmm, 15 min later, all my feeds just reappeared in bloglines. And boy am I happy about that. I gave feedster another shot in the meantime, and it is complete fucking shit.