Ok, I’ve had enough with Bloglines. I really like it but I’ve been seeing this same bug now for several months and they never fix it despite my bug reports. I’m at my breaking point now.
The bug is that I have the blog list in the left pane of my reader with unread items. When I click on it, the right pane reloads but instead of showing me the unread items, it shows me nothing, as if there weren’t any read items. But in the left pane, it marks all the items as read. They’re lost. Thanks a lot. To find them, I have to remember the last time I checked this particular feed within a fairly chunky timeframe (1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, day, week, month) and display all items in that time frame. This sucks and is error prone, so at best I get duplicate entries and at worst I still end up missing items.
Unfortunately, my requirements for a blog reader are pretty tough to match, though, or else I would have jumped ship after they failed to fix it three months ago instead of six:
- Web based - I read blogs from at least two different computers, so my subscriptions and read counts need to carry from one to another.
- Two paned - I really, really like the two paned system Bloglines uses. You have feeds and groups of feeds on the left, you click one, and your unread ones load in the right. The pervasive three paned view is just retarded: way too many clicks and far too little information, and a one paned view (like Planet) is just too much information due to the number of blogs I subscribe to.
- Ability to mark items as unread - Bloglines has this nice “Keep new” checkbox in each item that allows me to come back to an article later. Particularly nice for all those Boing Boing NSFW items.
Bloglines also has a bunch of nice features like references: other feeds tracked by bloglines which link to the item you’re viewing. Think of it like a bloglines-centric technorati search. Lack of that is hardly a dealbreaker, though. Boring things like RSS vs. Atom don’t interest me at all. I just want to read my blogs in a sane layout. But at this point, with the number of subscriptions I have, OPML import is a must-have.
Anyone have any suggestions?
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Blog readers
Joe,
I’ve been using http://www.netvibes.com for a few months now to aggregate my RSS reading.. it ticks all of the boxes for your overhyped “Web 2.0″ goodness and is really rather good.
It loads content from a number of different sites that I syndic…
Gregarius
I was frustrated with Bloglines issues a while back and switched to a self hosted install ofGregarius. Gregarius has it’s own set of issues to work through, but at least with access to the code you “can” fix them and it is being acti…
[...] Joe is having a hard time with bloglines for various reasons he outlines. Seems a few bugs that he’s had the courtesy to inform the developers about just aren’t getting looked at, so he’s on the hunt for something better. Tom posted about Gregarius yesterday and I’ve had a quick look - very nice so far. There are probably a few problems waiting to rear their ugly heads but you get the source, you get the chance to fix it yourself, if so inclined. I’m off to try it out for myself. You can also bookmark this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos [...]
[...] Remember a while ago when I was indignant about RSS readers? Well, Google just updated their Reader and it’s incredibly good. When Google Reader first came out, its interface was incredibly disappointing. They just didn’t capture my reading experience, but this new iteration hits it squarely on the head. Meanwhile, although Bloglines just rolled out a cute, new AJAXy navigation pane, it continues to disappoint with its constant bugginess and my inability to get them addressed. (Hey, guys, your feedback/communication system sucks ass. Fix it.) [...]