discovering non whats the plot plots...

(translated into normal english, the title would read, “discovering the things that have happened and/or the news in places other than this weblog”).

so for the longest time, i’ve been using bloglines… a while back, i gave google reader a shot, but it was totally unusable. finally, a few days back, they released a new, much nicer version. so much so that i would say i easily prefer it to bloglines… the new google reader solves the main issue i have with bloglines - that once you’ve read the feeds, you can’t ever see them again and they’re gone forever. it also adds some nice new features (starring, and the public watchlist are really neat features). and the new ui is awesome…

so far, i only have two complaints about the new reader - first, it doesn’t refresh automatically (or does so after a very long time). this isn’t a big deal because there are firefox extensions to do this kind of thing. the second is a bit more problematic - the default refresh values for feeds seems to be way too long to me. this is fine for 99% of sites because they typically are not updated that frequently. however, for watching something like the fatwallet deals forum, the default rate doesn’t seem to cut it (bloglines also has some default, but i never really “noticed” it with fatwallet for example, whereas i found myself often wondering, “wait, no new deal postings?” while using google reader - which may also mean that bloglines also has this problem, i haven’t really done any real testing on this). recently, i’ve also subscribed to the del.icio.us hotlist and y! top news, which change pretty often.

so my solution to this problem is to handle those types of feeds with a combination of netvibes and my desktop rss reader (so if i miss them while i am at work during the day, i can see them when i go home). so for the time being, i’ll probably try to stick to using google reader. if you’re still using bloglines and haven’t tried google reader yet, i suggest you export your feeds from it and give google reader a try. even though there is no perfect rss web based reader yet, maybe one day there will be :)