walkah: aggregator

OK Google Reader, you got me. I'll admit, I *almost* switched when Boris did. I tried it at the time... sorta liked it... but had my concerns. But this week, I've re-thought my position, given it another try, and I think it might stick. What changed? Well:

• Thunderbird 2.0b1 was released (more on that later). What does that have to do with it? Well, one complaint was that reader doesn't support authenticated feeds - which I use a *lot* of for work. Incidentally those are the same feeds I'm most interested in having access to when offline. I actually find Thunderbird's feed handling decent - and the nice part of having work feeds in my mail app is that I follow a similar workflow there as I do with my mail (including growl alerts for new posts), and there's a clear separation between stuff I need to pay attention to vs. the rest (although, most of the feeds I follow are work related - the ones I'm talking about here are bug reports and internal tickets, etc).
• Getting the n91. Simple: a phone with wifi is amazingly useful. I can do a quick feed catchup anywhere with wifi without having to drag out my laptop. OK, maybe this mobile craze has legs.
• Discovering the Google Reader Notifier extension for firefox. It helps me keep an eye on what's been posted without having an extra (or even an extra tab) open.

It took a little fiddling with the workflow, a bit of adjustment, and some time memorizing the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm finally pretty happy with things. And, I no longer have to worry about syncing issues.

I've been a long time user of both NetNewsWire and endo - and I love both for different reasons. But, man, google is actually making web apps I don't hate. *gasp*

well, i've been meaning to blog this for a while. but, adriaan quietly released endo recently. while, yes, it's yet another rss feed reader, it's dmy first impression was: different.

however, here I am 10 days and 7 point releases later, and I have to say, I now have a netnewswire license that's not getting a whole heck of a lot of use. in general, I'm a big fan of adriaan's work (this post brought to you by ecto of course). he always manages to cram in one or two features ahead of everyone else, and has always been incredibly responsive to bug reports and feature requests.

some of my favourite endo features include:

• completely mouse-free, rapid reading. endo features adriaan's awesome "graphical shell" for switching groups just by typing a few letters. using that coupled with the good, natural key-bindings for moving between articles, and i never touch my mouse (which is a good thing).
• per-feed notification (i.e. if something work related comes in, find out right away vs. during regular feed reading).
• built-in bittorrent support. (ok, i haven't actually used this yet, but it's an awesome idea!)
• support for xCal and hCal - to automagically add events to iCal! (try it out with upcoming.org feeds!).
• attention.xml based sync'ing. I don't love this because i necessarily think attention.xml is an awesome format... but it is a public format, which means it's something other aggregators (like, say drupal's built in aggregator) can sync against it. plus it seems to work much better than NNW's FTP sync ever has for me.

now, i have to admit, the workflow is slightly different - if you're used to the "mail" style reading of a NNW... and there are a couple things I'm not crazy about in the default endo installation... although lots of things have been fixed or changed already (in a mere 10 days!). However, here are a few small tips that made endo my new feed reader:

• turn off the colour backgrounds for articles (in the left pane). the easiest way to do this is to set them in the subscription window (hint: if you change the color for the group, it applies to all feeds in that group). frankly, i find the colours distracting - and make it harder to tell which articles are read (for me anyway).
• get a style that lists the feed name - which the default doesn't. i'm currently using UnifiedAqua. (otherwise it's hard to tell the source of the current article)
• use group icons
• make use of cmd-9

go now. give it a whirl.