joe shaw

Thanks everyone who emailed and trackbacked about my feed reader questions. People recommended both hosted services and software packages I can run on my own server. The hosted services included FeedLounge, Google Reader, and Netvibes. Software recommended included Tiny Tiny RSS, Gregarius, and FoF Redux. Several people also suggested workarounds for my Bloglines problem, but unfortunately most didn’t work, or at least didn’t work for more than a couple hours.

Before I go through the readers, there is one requirement I didn’t mention on my previous post which I didn’t realize was so important to me: sorting feeds oldest first.

It makes a lot of sense for blogs on web pages to have the newest item at the top. It’s an attention grabbing headline. It allows the casual reader to very quickly see if there is any new content to be read. But when I subscribe to the RSS feed and read it regularly — especially in the two-pane format — I want them to be in chronological order. It becomes more of a narrative experience from the poster. I check my feeds several times a day; probably a little less than I read email but more often than I check IRC. Especially when feeds are grouped together, this makes my reading flow smooth from top of the page to the bottom. As a result, lacking this feature is a showstopper.

To the list!

• FeedLounge - This is a $5/month service with a free 3 hour tour. How am I supposed to evaluate a complete piece of software in three hours? I need to be stranded on an island with Mary Ann for three seasons. Metaphorically. Fortunately FeedLounge doesn’t have featureitis, so I was pretty much able to get the gist of it within 30 minutes or so. It’s a great feed reader: the layout is clean and it has AJAXy features which make interacting with the site pleasant. It does have a two-paned view, but you can’t sort oldest-first. I am pretty sure it didn’t do groups the way I want — by clicking on the group and displaying all new items — but we’ll never know because my three hours have been up for a good twenty-something hours. So the end result? I would pay $5/mo for this if it had these features, but it doesn’t, so I definitely won’t.
• Google Reader - This is essentially three paned, so it’s right out.
• Netvibes - Ditto. And it’s AJAX overboard. This is a clear case of building something using the hot, fun technology over building something which is useful.
• Tiny Tiny RSS - This one is probably the best of the bunch. It’s relatively easy to install, and it has a very nice clean default layout. It doesn’t have all the features I want, but it is Free Software. It’s written in PHP, which I wouldn’t really say is a feature, but I’ve been exposed to enough PHP that I can probably make it do what I want. It’s probably a little bit buggier than the hosted services, but I’m most likely to go with this if I get bored some weekend.
• Gregarius - I didn’t give this one a test beyond just trying the live demo site. I didn’t really care for it, but I think it’s largely because I wasn’t able to see the customization options. I didn’t like the default layout; probably no problem to fix with some CSS. Items weren’t automatically marked as read when I clicked on them (in fact, I couldn’t find out how to mark things as read at all), but maybe that’s customizable as well? And items sorted newest-first. For software like this, a good demo site is what I need to really decide, because I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time installing software and dependencies, customizing it, etc. and decide that I don’t like it. I already spend my entire workday in front of a computer and have a general dislike of software as it is.
• FoF Redux - I didn’t even try this. It has the scariest user-interface I’ve ever seen in a feed reader. I’m a hacker, but these days I just don’t want to deal with complicated software anymore.

So I don’t really know where I’m at. I really do appreciate everyone’s feedback, but it would just seem that I am an unyielding, covetous asshole who will never be happy. Just like my therapist always said.

Update: Coworker Pete Connelly helped me out with Gregarius by pointing me to his setup and letting me play around with it. Good news: you can sort oldest-first and you can click on a group and get all the items from that group. So featurewise things are good, but the main downside is that the UI feels very clumsy to me. For example:

• The interface is themeable, although the themes linked off the project website don’t show much diveristy in layout. Does that imply that the theming system is inflexible? This worries me.
• Items don’t automatically get marked as read when you click on a feed. This should probably be an option.
• Because items aren’t marked as read, if you have oldest sorting first, you have to go back up to the top of the page to click the “Mark feed as read” button.
• It takes three clicks to toggle an item as unread once it’s marked as read. First you click on a tiny icon with no tooltip to show a hidden content area, then click a checkbox, then click save. Do I have to click save for every item I check? Does this mean I can’t batch them?
• The feeds are on the side but not in a frame, so they scroll away as I scroll through a feed. One of the themes seems to do frames. Alternatively maybe I could get around this with some absolute CSS positioning magic.