September 2nd, 2005 | No Comments
Synchronizing Feeds: FeedDemon + Newsgator
As RSS feeds have become more and more a part of my online life (more so now than e-mails, probably), I’ve needed to rely on better software to look after the resulting “river of news” that I’m in danger of drowning in.
After having tried Firefox’s Live Bookmarks (far from adequate) and some free aggregators for a while (most notably FeedReader), I gave FeedDemon a try, and have yet to look back.
Before being acquired by NewsGator however, the synchronization of feeds read across PCs was the one thing that it was really missing. Sure, you could link it up to your Bloglines subscriptions, but if you were accessing the feeds from 2 different PCs, like many people would be from work and home, you would often find yourself having to wade through the same feeds twice to get to the new stories.
Luckily, with NewsGator (and the 2 years free subscription to their Business Standard account, which gives access to their Online and Outlook editions of the service, that was given to users as part of the FeedDemon acquisition), I can now keep track of feeds from multiple locations, and the system appears to work quite well, with just the odd post showing up again even though I’ve already read.
Access to the online edition also means that there is no need to install FeedDemon on every PC I use, and although it isn’t as easy to use as FeedDemon itself, it is quite sufficient for staying on top of all these feeds. I’m sure that as time goes on, NewsGator Online will become a more powerful online aggregator (with a little more use of AJAX here and there?), which may eventually do away with the need for a standalone version of FeedDemon altogether. In fact, one of the most satisfying things is clicking on the “mark post as read” icon in NewsGator and seeing the number of unread items gradually disappear.
Another area that has also impressed me is the availablity of support - I’ve always been impressed with the hands-on nature that FeedDemon’s creator, Nick Bradbury, has to customer support and acting on feedback. Luckily, since NewsGator took over, this still seems to be the case - even though he may now have a few more people to help him out, in the one instance that I had a problem (this is Beta software, after all), I got a quick and personal response, which is always nice to see. There’s also a useful forum for discussing problems and to put forward ideas for future FeedDemon development.
One thing that is on my personal wishlist is for some sort of “duplicate post/story” filter - I’m finding that as RSS feeds are being aggregated across sites and into other feeds, I’m coming across the same stories - it would be good to have a filter that would recognise and supress duplicate entries, although I guess this might not be very easy to do, and may just require a bit better feed management on my part to make sure that I’m not subscribed to feeds that duplicate others. But I think that this could be a growing problem as the syndication of content grows.
WV4 is the online home of Rob Lewis, featuring a blog covering a variety of subjects, mainly web design, CSS and PHP, as well as featuring useful links to other websites.