I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.
The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.
The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses – I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.
I do like the “trends” view in GR. Not because it is helpful in organizing or accessing information (it isn’t), but it’s kinda interesting in its own right. Here’s a screenshot as of 5 minutes ago:
I’m a bit surprised at just how much I’m reading. Almost 18,000 items in a month? I’d have never guessed that. Actually, almost half of that isn’t really “reading” per se, but “viewing”. Photos from Flickr. Which is why the “photo gallery” view would be great.
There are some shortcomings.
- I’ve got a nagging feeling that by using GR, I am continuing to “feed the beast” – by teaching Google about what interests me, and by providing guidance about relationships between feeds and items.
- There isn’t a “blogroll” or live OPML view of my tags/folders. BlogBridge lets me publish tags as live OPML documents, which is how my edublogs directory is managed. There isn’t currently a way to replicate that from within GR. Yes, I could periodically export a tag as an OPML file, and post that somewhere. Not the same.
All in all, I think I’ll keep using Google Reader for now. I’ll have to figure out how to reconcile my feed subscriptions with BB so that I can keep maintaining the edublogs directory, but that will work itself out somehow.
I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.
But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.
So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.
I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:
I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).
Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader…
I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.
But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.
So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.
I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:
I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).
Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader…
BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn’t feel like a Java app – it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.
It’s also got support for notifications – using Growl on MacOSX and whatevertheheck Windows uses on that side of the fence. Handy. Now… If only they’d get that open-link-in-background-browser-window thing working, so my browser wouldn’t pop to the front every time I open a link…
I totally recommend BlogBridge to anyone looking for a way to easily/effectively manage a LOT of RSS feeds. I’d simply drown under my subscriptions without things like star ratings and smart feeds. And the built-in OPML/reading-list feature is simply killer.
They’ve released regular installer versions for MacOSX and Windows, as well as versions for Linux and Java WebStart (if you use the WebStart version, it can auto-update for you).
If you’ve already used BlogBridge, be sure to sync all of your guides with the (free) BlogBridge service before upgrading, as they’ve optimized the local database file format, which may blow away your previous database. Syncing seems quite bulletproof, so it’s a good habit to get into anyway…
I’m toying with the idea of doing a screencast to show just how quickly I can check all of my feeds. I can seriously check all 400+ feeds in about 10 minutes (or less).
BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn’t feel like a Java app – it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.
It’s also got support for notifications – using Growl on MacOSX and whatevertheheck Windows uses on that side of the fence. Handy. Now… If only they’d get that open-link-in-background-browser-window thing working, so my browser wouldn’t pop to the front every time I open a link…
I totally recommend BlogBridge to anyone looking for a way to easily/effectively manage a LOT of RSS feeds. I’d simply drown under my subscriptions without things like star ratings and smart feeds. And the built-in OPML/reading-list feature is simply killer.
They’ve released regular installer versions for MacOSX and Windows, as well as versions for Linux and Java WebStart (if you use the WebStart version, it can auto-update for you).
If you’ve already used BlogBridge, be sure to sync all of your guides with the (free) BlogBridge service before upgrading, as they’ve optimized the local database file format, which may blow away your previous database. Syncing seems quite bulletproof, so it’s a good habit to get into anyway…
I’m toying with the idea of doing a screencast to show just how quickly I can check all of my feeds. I can seriously check all 400+ feeds in about 10 minutes (or less).
I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.
Brian’s students have been off to a great start in their AggRSSive project – and they have plans to make it even more kick-ass. Tyler’s described plans were pretty much spot-on to what is needed. Not complete, but a darned good start. Can’t wait to get my hands on that…
At Northern Voice, someone from a genetic engineering organization (didn’t catch the name of the guy or the agency – I was sure it was Genentech, but others were sure it wasn’t) was describing a mind-blowing RSS-based workflow that he’s using to tie research, automated lab results, individual publishing, and lots of other sources together into one interface. They have some AI ninjas crunching everything to make sure it gets to where it needs to go, and to start making connections between stuff. He mentioned that as a result of this AI-based aggregation, they were able to make a completely new discovery that linked two previously unrelated topics (proteomics and something else…) Very cool stuff. We should see if they can give a tour, and if they’d be willing to share with the rest of the class.
In the meantime, I just took a quick romp through SourceForge to see what else has been done in the area. Not a lot, unfortunately. But, I did come across a rather cool server-side aggregator that I hadn’t heard of before. sux0r appears initially to behave like others (Feed on Feeds, etc…) but – it doesn’t have categories. Well, it does, but not in the traditional sense. You create a set of tags, and then proceed to flag aggregated posts as belonging to any of these tags. After a while, the bayesian magic has enough to chew on, and it begins to automatically tag incoming posts. Latent semantic analysis to apply folksonomies?
Anyway, although the concept is cool, and will form an important part of EduGlu, the current incarnation in sux0r won’t scale to thousands of feeds in thousands of categories, over dozens of years.
OK. Enough thinking about this stuff for now. Back to work…
I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.
Brian’s students have been off to a great start in their AggRSSive project – and they have plans to make it even more kick-ass. Tyler’s described plans were pretty much spot-on to what is needed. Not complete, but a darned good start. Can’t wait to get my hands on that…
At Northern Voice, someone from a genetic engineering organization (didn’t catch the name of the guy or the agency – I was sure it was Genentech, but others were sure it wasn’t) was describing a mind-blowing RSS-based workflow that he’s using to tie research, automated lab results, individual publishing, and lots of other sources together into one interface. They have some AI ninjas crunching everything to make sure it gets to where it needs to go, and to start making connections between stuff. He mentioned that as a result of this AI-based aggregation, they were able to make a completely new discovery that linked two previously unrelated topics (proteomics and something else…) Very cool stuff. We should see if they can give a tour, and if they’d be willing to share with the rest of the class.
In the meantime, I just took a quick romp through SourceForge to see what else has been done in the area. Not a lot, unfortunately. But, I did come across a rather cool server-side aggregator that I hadn’t heard of before. sux0r appears initially to behave like others (Feed on Feeds, etc…) but – it doesn’t have categories. Well, it does, but not in the traditional sense. You create a set of tags, and then proceed to flag aggregated posts as belonging to any of these tags. After a while, the bayesian magic has enough to chew on, and it begins to automatically tag incoming posts. Latent semantic analysis to apply folksonomies?
Anyway, although the concept is cool, and will form an important part of EduGlu, the current incarnation in sux0r won’t scale to thousands of feeds in thousands of categories, over dozens of years.
OK. Enough thinking about this stuff for now. Back to work…
In yet another flip-flop in my preferences for primary applications, I just switched to Vienna 2 as my RSS/Feed aggregator. It’s basically an Open Source clone of NetNewsWire. NNW kinda turned sour for me when it was bought out and the .Mac etc… features got tossed in the trash can.
Vienna is a nice app – it’s a native Cocoa app, so it runs spanky fast. It uses the SQL Lite database, so it’s pretty speedy – and there’s a chance I could write something to do something useful with the database if I really wanted to.
I’ve been using Blogbridge for the last couple of months, and it’s a really nice app. I just got tired of command+tabbing back to it after hitting a link, and having my RAM sucked up by Java’s greediness.
Things I prefer in Vienna over Blogbridge:
- Performance – despite the claims of awesome performance for a Java app, BB was always just a little slow, and sucked up terabytes of RAM. Well, not quite terabytes, but an unholy proportion of my system’s available resources went to sustaining BB.
- Pages sent to the browser actually open in the background as they should. Man, it’s annoying having to command+Tab after hitting a link every. single. time.
- Searching. BB doesn’t have a search tool. WTF? That’s kinda the point of having a local database of posts, no?
Things I’ll miss about Blogbridge:
- Feed suggestions – found LOTS of great new feeds using that feature, which spiders my current feeds and their posts to find relevant links that I’m not subscribed to.
- Starz. Much more granular to be able to apply a 0-5 star rating to a feed or post, rather than just marking as flagged.
- Star ratings on feeds. I really like having posts ranked higher based on the priority I’ve given to the source. Wonder if that’s possible to reproduce using some kind of smart feed in Vienna…
- Flickr feed handling – rather than just displaying these feeds as straight RSS subscriptions, it presented a form of photo album view. Very cool.
- The combined view, showing full posts of all feeds in one place, rather than having to cycle through individual posts. It’ll just take some getting used to – might be more efficient with separate post view anyway.
My switching to Vienna isn’t a mark against Blogbridge at all – it’s great software, and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a reader. It’s also not a permanent switch – I’m apparently pretty non-commital when it comes to software, since I just have to keep going and trying the shiny new toys as I come across them. I’ll be keeping my eye on Blogbridge, since they’ve got a lot of cool ideas in the works.
In a further flip-flop, I’m trying Firefox yet again, after being forced to do so after my WordPress 2.0 upgrade exposed a funky cookie-related bug that makes Safari kinda unusable for me (oddly, since it’s working fine for King in his new WP installation…).
In yet another flip-flop in my preferences for primary applications, I just switched to Vienna 2 as my RSS/Feed aggregator. It’s basically an Open Source clone of NetNewsWire. NNW kinda turned sour for me when it was bought out and the .Mac etc… features got tossed in the trash can.
Vienna is a nice app – it’s a native Cocoa app, so it runs spanky fast. It uses the SQL Lite database, so it’s pretty speedy – and there’s a chance I could write something to do something useful with the database if I really wanted to.
I’ve been using Blogbridge for the last couple of months, and it’s a really nice app. I just got tired of command+tabbing back to it after hitting a link, and having my RAM sucked up by Java’s greediness.
Things I prefer in Vienna over Blogbridge:
- Performance – despite the claims of awesome performance for a Java app, BB was always just a little slow, and sucked up terabytes of RAM. Well, not quite terabytes, but an unholy proportion of my system’s available resources went to sustaining BB.
- Pages sent to the browser actually open in the background as they should. Man, it’s annoying having to command+Tab after hitting a link every. single. time.
- Searching. BB doesn’t have a search tool. WTF? That’s kinda the point of having a local database of posts, no?
Things I’ll miss about Blogbridge:
- Feed suggestions – found LOTS of great new feeds using that feature, which spiders my current feeds and their posts to find relevant links that I’m not subscribed to.
- Starz. Much more granular to be able to apply a 0-5 star rating to a feed or post, rather than just marking as flagged.
- Star ratings on feeds. I really like having posts ranked higher based on the priority I’ve given to the source. Wonder if that’s possible to reproduce using some kind of smart feed in Vienna…
- Flickr feed handling – rather than just displaying these feeds as straight RSS subscriptions, it presented a form of photo album view. Very cool.
- The combined view, showing full posts of all feeds in one place, rather than having to cycle through individual posts. It’ll just take some getting used to – might be more efficient with separate post view anyway.
My switching to Vienna isn’t a mark against Blogbridge at all – it’s great software, and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a reader. It’s also not a permanent switch – I’m apparently pretty non-commital when it comes to software, since I just have to keep going and trying the shiny new toys as I come across them. I’ll be keeping my eye on Blogbridge, since they’ve got a lot of cool ideas in the works.
In a further flip-flop, I’m trying Firefox yet again, after being forced to do so after my WordPress 2.0 upgrade exposed a funky cookie-related bug that makes Safari kinda unusable for me (oddly, since it’s working fine for King in his new WP installation…).
I’m preparing some stuff for a workshop I’m doing on weblogs and RSS next month, and am gathering some links to aggregators I could recommend to the people coming to the workshop. Obviously, Bloglines and Google’s RSS reader are good online aggregators, but desktop tools are just plain cooler.
I was clicking links on the Wikipedia list of RSS aggregators, and saw BlogBridge – a cross-platform, java-based aggregator designed for “civilians”.
But, it’s got a LOT of nice little touches. You can tag feeds. Star them (and filter views based on star ratings). Create smart listings of posts. It also does something cool that I haven’t seen in another aggregator – it creates a little thumbnail indicator bargraph for the activity of a feed over the past few days. You can also give it a list of keywords, and it automatically highlights these words in every post.
It doesn’t come with a “new items only” view, but it’s simple to create a new SmartFeed for that. Also, it’s java, so performance can be pretty sucktacular – but that might be a side-effect of having 400 feeds in it… (actually, I’m down to 366 – BlogBridge choked on several feeds on importing my subscriptions from OPML – but that may be a result of dead/invalid feeds and BlogBridge may just be more vocal about that than NNW or Safari)
(Click for larger view)
Update: I also tried RSSOwl, but it just pegged my CPU to 100% for 20 minutes with no visible sign of doing anything productive. Force Quit.
I’ve been configuring BlogBridge for a few minutes, and am really impressed with some of the unique features. If I can get a “new items only” view as a default, rather than just another SmartFeed, I’m very likely to switch to it. It also helps that it’s free and open source, and the developers appear to have a healthy sense of humour as well. Actually, I’m going to try switching to BlogBridge for a week to see how it works out. If it winds up sucking up 4GB of VM or something, or the java performance penalty is too great, I’ll switch back to Safari or NNW (or something else?).
Update: I’m trying the “Feed Discovery” tool of BlogBridge – it can scan through your feeds and find others that you might be interested in. Holy. Crap. It’s finding stuff that I’d never heard of before, but is totally interesting. Not helping me with reducing the infoaddiction, though. Damn you, BlogBridge! 🙂
I’m preparing some stuff for a workshop I’m doing on weblogs and RSS next month, and am gathering some links to aggregators I could recommend to the people coming to the workshop. Obviously, Bloglines and Google’s RSS reader are good online aggregators, but desktop tools are just plain cooler.
I was clicking links on the Wikipedia list of RSS aggregators, and saw BlogBridge – a cross-platform, java-based aggregator designed for “civilians”.
But, it’s got a LOT of nice little touches. You can tag feeds. Star them (and filter views based on star ratings). Create smart listings of posts. It also does something cool that I haven’t seen in another aggregator – it creates a little thumbnail indicator bargraph for the activity of a feed over the past few days. You can also give it a list of keywords, and it automatically highlights these words in every post.
It doesn’t come with a “new items only” view, but it’s simple to create a new SmartFeed for that. Also, it’s java, so performance can be pretty sucktacular – but that might be a side-effect of having 400 feeds in it… (actually, I’m down to 366 – BlogBridge choked on several feeds on importing my subscriptions from OPML – but that may be a result of dead/invalid feeds and BlogBridge may just be more vocal about that than NNW or Safari)
(Click for larger view)
Update: I also tried RSSOwl, but it just pegged my CPU to 100% for 20 minutes with no visible sign of doing anything productive. Force Quit.
I’ve been configuring BlogBridge for a few minutes, and am really impressed with some of the unique features. If I can get a “new items only” view as a default, rather than just another SmartFeed, I’m very likely to switch to it. It also helps that it’s free and open source, and the developers appear to have a healthy sense of humour as well. Actually, I’m going to try switching to BlogBridge for a week to see how it works out. If it winds up sucking up 4GB of VM or something, or the java performance penalty is too great, I’ll switch back to Safari or NNW (or something else?).
Update: I’m trying the “Feed Discovery” tool of BlogBridge – it can scan through your feeds and find others that you might be interested in. Holy. Crap. It’s finding stuff that I’d never heard of before, but is totally interesting. Not helping me with reducing the infoaddiction, though. Damn you, BlogBridge! 🙂
So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).
Also, the filter/sorting options are just plain incomplete. Without a “show only new items” option, it’s a real pain in the ass to view new items. Either you have to set it to show a whole bunch of items, and sort the newest items to the top, to ensure viewing all new items, or you narrow the display and have to iterate over various subgroupings or filterings with the “New” sort option selected. Please, fix this… Add a “New items only” option, that would do what it said (and, items wouldn’t disappear from the display as they are “read” – they would simply be marked as read, and disappear the next time the display is refreshed).
So, after running the handy dandy Safari feeds to OPML export script, I’m back in NetNewsWire. It’s a really great app, but I already miss the Safari unified display (warts and all) – the “Combined View” layout in NNW just isn’t the same. I’ll give it a week or two to see if I can get my head back into NNW-think.
Meanwhile, this is what greeted me in NNW after running the import-from-OPML process, and updating all feeds:
Update: I went screaming back to Safari RSS less than 24 hours after trying to switch to NNW. Performance wasn’t any better when using the Combined view in NNW – it may have actually been worse. I’m back to Safari RSS now, and am just learning to be more patient as things load 🙂
So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).
Also, the filter/sorting options are just plain incomplete. Without a “show only new items” option, it’s a real pain in the ass to view new items. Either you have to set it to show a whole bunch of items, and sort the newest items to the top, to ensure viewing all new items, or you narrow the display and have to iterate over various subgroupings or filterings with the “New” sort option selected. Please, fix this… Add a “New items only” option, that would do what it said (and, items wouldn’t disappear from the display as they are “read” – they would simply be marked as read, and disappear the next time the display is refreshed).
So, after running the handy dandy Safari feeds to OPML export script, I’m back in NetNewsWire. It’s a really great app, but I already miss the Safari unified display (warts and all) – the “Combined View” layout in NNW just isn’t the same. I’ll give it a week or two to see if I can get my head back into NNW-think.
Meanwhile, this is what greeted me in NNW after running the import-from-OPML process, and updating all feeds:
Update: I went screaming back to Safari RSS less than 24 hours after trying to switch to NNW. Performance wasn’t any better when using the Combined view in NNW – it may have actually been worse. I’m back to Safari RSS now, and am just learning to be more patient as things load 🙂
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