In light of my recent bad experience with Bloglines, I’ve been testing out other RSS aggregators. I tried out a desktop system (Sage) and four web-based systems (NewsGator, Rojo, Kinja, and Newsburst). A lot of these have different, unique features that I didn’t explore – I simply wanted to know if they could help me keep on top of my favorite blogs. Here’s how they shake out:

Sage: I really like this program. You need to be running the Firefox browser, and you have to do minimal software installation. You tell Sage when to look for updates, so you are literally up-to-the-minute caught up with everyone who’s updated their blogs. It displays as a sidebar, leaving you to continue browsing or whatever while Sage looks for new updates. Click on the feed title, and a summary appears to the right. From there, you can click straight to the new post (in the archives) or the front page of the blog. Firefox can auto-detect “live” web pages, and it’s a rapid three-click process to add a new blog to your collection. The primary disadvantage of Sage is that it’s desktop-based. Meaning those of you who read blogs at work (but only during lunch break, I know!) and at home are kind of screwed. It’s a tiny bit slow if you follow a gazillion blogs like I do, as it takes a few minutes to check each one for updates. It doesn’t tell if you if there’s more than one unread-by-you article in a blog, and their alphabetization algorithm doesn’t know to ignore “the” – as in “The Candy Shop” will be ordered under “TeaTree.” I couldn’t figure out a way to mark all of my subscriptions as read without clicking on each link individually. Lastly, the export function doesn’t make an OPML file that is always recognized by other RSS aggregators.

NewsGator: This was the best web-based RSS aggregator I tried. It was easy to set up and subscribe, and I think it imported my Sage OPML without any hiccups (not 100% sure b/c I also had a Bloglines OPML file for the sites that did not like my Sage output). FWIW, the Bloglines OPML file imported smoothly with every feed reader. NewsGator automatically checks for updates once an hour, and with the settings I put, it presents only the newly updated blogs (and tells me how many new articles/blog). You can set up a tiny script on your personal webpage that displays your blogroll, automatically updating it as you subscribe and unsubscribe from blogs, and you can make your OPML file available for others to download. All feeds can be marked as read in a single click. Occasionally (as in this happened to 3 or 4 of the 80+ blogs I tracked over the last few days), it shows old articles as new, but only if there’s also a new article posted. (That is to say, when SusanPurlsALot writes a new entry, instead of showing 1 new article, it might say there are 5.) There currently is no way to go directly from NewsGator to the main blog page – they will only link you to the archived page. Therefore, if someone has three new articles, you have to click on each one separately (or, from the blog archive page, click on “Main”). Best of all, NewsGator has VERY RESPONSIVE tech support and feedback. I asked a question on their discussion forum and got an answer from a NG support staff in <1 day. Browsing through discussion archives, I noticed that a number of customer suggestions were rapidly incorporated. I also emailed a question to their support staff and received a reply within hours.

Rojo: This ranked second in my evaluation of web-based aggregators. It is easy to see a new entry and is, imo, optimal for people who are strictly interested in content and don’t care to go to the original blog page. (I don’t know how most of you browse blogs – I use a feed reader to let me know who updated, and I go straight to the blog’s front page to read the new article.) Provided that the RSS includes the entire text of the article (some feeds – like mine – automatically truncate entries), you may never have to directly visit a knitblog site again. It is easy to add/subtract feeds to your subscription list. Rojo shows updates fairly quickly, and I would guess that it checks every hour. You can mark all entries as read, but they still show up for re-reading. The downside – not everyone publishes full length articles in their RSS, and it royally screwed up the import of my Sage OPML file (over half of the feeds were wrong).

I didn’t care for Kinja or cNet’s Newsburst. Kinja couldn’t understand my Sage OPML, and it seemed slow to identify updates in my subscriptions. The digest view is full of obnoxious advertising, and there was no way to mark content as read. (It was up to you to remember if you’d seen it already or not.) A minor quibble – the top of the webpage would exclaim: “You are viewing joshiro’s digest” – which conjured up all manner of chunky, wet images. As far as Newsburst, it was able to import the Sage OPML file, but it had many of the same issues as Kinja. I felt it was slow to see new blog entries, there wasn’t a way to mark articles as read, and I couldn’t get rid of the things I wasn’t interested in seeing (as in the Top News Story).

In the interest of completeness, I’ll mention Bloglines – for most of us, I think it is the feed reader of choice? I’m betting you’ve used it for months or longer, so I am only going to highlight what I think are serious design flaws. First and foremost – it doesn’t update feeds. That is the primary function of a feed reader, and it fails miserably in that regard. (Don’t believe me? See here.) Compounding that problem, it looks (to the subscriber) that the blog simply isn’t being updated. There’s no indication of any error, and it has to occur to you days or weeks later that hey, so-and-so has been awful quiet. The second major problem is that BLOGLINES DOESN’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS ABOUT CUSTOMER SUPPORT. Questions and requests for tech support go into a black yawning hole. If you get any kind of reply at all, it’s a canned “We’re looking into it” response that doesn’t help you identify whether or not the problem is on your end. There is no link on their front page to their tech discussion forums, but what does it matter, because it also clearly says, “Please note that these forums are not monitored by Bloglines Customer Care.” Here’s a long term example of how little Bloglines tried to help out when there was a problem. Overall, it must be running some kind of messed up proprietary program, because NONE of the other aggregators I looked at had any trouble seeing updates on any of the blogs I read.

So – to sum up – Sage and Newsgator get my most enthusiastic thumbs up.

Want to export your Bloglines subscription? Remove “joshiro” and replace it with your user name.

http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=joshiro

Save the page to your computer, and transfer it to an RSS aggregator that works!