I’ve tried various online aggregators (including BlogLines), but none of them worked as well for me as Google Reader, since I keep track of 150+ different feeds. I suppose that I just never noticed the delay that some people are complaining about because I don’t always check my feeds at the same time everyday, plus I’ve got quite a few, so it doesn’t affect me all that much.

On top of that, I’m constantly switching between computers (including a few that have DeepFreeze installed) so having everything online is a must. If I run into a better aggregator, I’ll definitely switch, but there’s not one at the moment that works as well for me.

Go for Google Reader, BA!

I used MagpieRSS: RSS for PHP (http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/) to write my own. If you want to know what it looks like:
http://www.carlrobitaille.org/rssfeeds/

Carl

I’d gotten tired of using my browser to read the various (5 ) Blogs I pay any attention to. So, for the past week or so, I’ve been yutzing around with RSS readers.

Of course, there are dozens and dozens for Windows and Mac each… and a few for Linux.

I’m afraid I rather skimped on searching and testing the Windows readers. None was appealing “out of the box”. Long story… less long, I focused on the Mac.

After a week, I can say I’ve focused it down to three possibilities. NetNewsWire, Vienna, and Shrook. At this point, it’s come down to esthetics, and how well *I* interface with *it* – that is, pure personal preference. Each is fast, easy to use, imports feeds (Shrook will not only import from OPML, but directly from NetNewsWire- a nice touch). The others lost out because they were klunky, slow (Google Reader, oddly, was very slow for me), or so old as to be lacking in what might be termed as “standard features”

yeah, I’m a day late, and a dollar ($1.24 in Boulder) short. But I like airing my opinions as well as the next guy – and I can occasionally use somebody’s blog for it.

And since I started using it and getting into feeds, it’s never gone down.

Whatever you choose, Phil, I’m sure you’ll love.

Some sites don’t do immediate RSS updates the instant a new post goes up, and the aggregators themselves don’t scan the sites every 10 seconds for new posts. I think it’s really more of the first than the second, because I have some sites show up more quickly than others. It seems especially true for sites who run their feeds through a service like FeedBurner, because then FeedBurner has to update their feed for the site from the site’s original feed before it gets aggregated to feed readers.

How it affects you I guess really depends on how many sites you keep up with. I’m currently subscribed to 55 feeds. Some I just scan for stuff that catches my eye, some I read every word on. If I tried to keep up with 55 sites the old fashioned way, I’d never do anything else.

If you use Thunderbird for Emails anyway, use the Feedreader in there, it’s really nice.

Opera has a nice aggregator, too, although on my platform (sparc-linux) it leaks memory, so I can’t use it.

Currently I use akregator (KDE) for the few blogs that have relevant pictures as part of their content and not just text.

For pure text-content blogs (i.e. where I ignore the pictures), I prefer newsbeuter. ncurses-interface, fast, nice, cool, the way I want it in my screen-session between mutt, abook, slrn, irssi and elinks.

What does Google have that Sage doesn’t?

The ability for me to get my feeds from any computer no matter where I am.

I’m sometimes on my work computer, sometimes on my home computer, sometimes on a different computer altogether. All I have to do is log in to Google and there are my feeds and my settings. You can get the Google Reader Notifier addon for Firefox and have notification of new posts from Firefox as well.

The great thing is that it synchronises across different computers. The company are also working on an online version as well.

Take a look at http://www.feedghost.com

Simon

My only beef with Sage is that when you ask it to open an item, it always opens it in the topmost browser window. This means that if you open up a blog entry and then because it takes a while you decide to look at something else, the something else gets wiped out as soon as Sage finally opens up, even if you’re in a different window from the one you were in when you asked Sage to look at something (does that make sense?).

NetNewsWire is lovely when it works but has the habit of crashing at random about once a week. No long-term negative effects from same, though.

Might take a look at Google Reader due to the groundswell of support here.

The others are: Google Earth Hacks, Order of the Stick, Astronomy Cast, four friends’ blogs, and the report feed for Earthquakes Canada.

What does Google have that Sage doesn’t?

I find I don’t need my feeds to be aggregated – it’s a quick mouseover the bookmarks and I can see what’s new.

I tried Google Reader when Bloglines stopped updating for awhile. I hated it. It imported my OPML just fine. But as far as trying to read feeds, I found it extremely non-intuitive to mark a folder as read, or preventing myself from re-reading stuff that I had already scrolled by. The beta Bloglines seemed to be trying to clone this, and after leaving a rather scathing feedback about what I absolutely hated about it, they’ve fixed those. But I still prefer the old Bloglines. And that’s what I was using when I read this.

I’ve currently got 1001 feeds right now. It used to be higher, and evidently some feeds have gone 404 or something. I can only remember getting rid of one feed in the past months.

And if it was something I was actually running on my machine, I’d be in a real hurt right now. MY machine is currently sitting across from me with the PS stripped out of it awaiting the return of a new/repaired/refurbished PS from New Egg. As it is, I’m doing a remote terminal connection to my old machine that I have setup for my kids. 2.4GHZ, 3 GB memory versus the 800MHZ and 128MB of the laptop I’m actually typing on. So I’m glad I’m being able to keep up online.