Google has released a web-based RSS reader and aggregator that is pretty nice. You can read all posts from all the feeds you subscribe to in a chronological order, or you can just read from a specific feed. It has lots of AJAX and a pretty smooth interface with shortcut keys that really speed up using it, although some people say it’s too slow. But I don’t read 1000 feeds. My issue with it is that it’s web-based, and while I’m employed building web software and I love the web as a universal platform, I still have to go to the website when I want to read my feeds, they’re not delivered to my desktop like in my email client. To state the obvious though, the cool thing about being web-based is that your customised feed list is available from any computer, even down to which posts you have read. That’s tidy work, and Daniel is gonna love it.
Here’s a couple of screenshots:
I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird until now to read RSS, which works OK for me; it doesn’t aggregate all feeds and adding new feeds is a touch clunky. But adding feeds in Google Reader is kinda clunky, too.
Which nicely delivers us to Reader’s ability to import an OPML file containing a list of feeds so that you don’t have to edit your feeds manually. As I said, I was using Thunderbird to read RSS before this, which stores your feed list in an RDF file. Luckily, Kevin Hemenway has created a Perl CGI script that converts Thunderbird’s RDF file into OPML. All you have to do is provide a URL pointing to your RDF file, which you can find in your Thunderbird profile, somewhere like:
C:\Documents and Settings\glenn\My Documents\Thunderbird\default.oto\Mail\News & Blogs, and it’s called feeds.rdf.
You’ll need to upload your RDF file somewhere, so you’re going to need some free web hosting or something.
Then, visit http://www.disobey.com/detergent/code/tb_opml_service.cgi?url=
and tack your RDF file’s URL on the end of that location string.
Thanks to Kevin Hemenway for this little script, it’s great and saved me some time…that I have now used writing this blog entry.