Solo Technology

Mentioned the other day that I wanted to look into bloglines and see how it would work if I were to use it on both computers and a Pocket PC. What I want to avoid is having to keep multiple/seperate rss readers somehow in sync. I think I can safely say it works well. For me, at least. [Here's my public list]

The site is pretty easy to figure out and the interface is just a tad retro. Or maybe I’m the only one that thinks “retro” when I see frames? Granted, the use of them doesn’t really bother me in this case and the app is easy to use as a reader. The keyboard shortcuts for reading articles are are pretty sweet too. It took a few minutes to orient myself in the interface. I won’t necessarily call it intuitive, but it really is pretty straight-forward.

The mobile version, as seen on my Pocket PC 2002 device, is great. Very easy to use and very responsive. When I first started messing with the site, I was adding feeds manually from the PC browser and checking things out on the Pocket PC browser. I’m not positive, but for a while it seemed like I had more sites on the PC than I did on the Pocket PC. But, after a while things seemed to sort themselves out. And, once I realized I could export and import OPML, I scrapped everything I had and imported the OPML that Netvibes graciously exported for me. That process went very smoothly and in very short order I was up and running.

Ack, speaking of Netvibes… I feel like such a traitor! Frankly, in general I like the Netvibes interface better, but bloglines works SO well on my mobile that I’m going to run with it for a while. And heck, since I have all this in OPML, I can switch readers pretty easily. (hmm, Netvibes exports, I never thought to see if it imports too…).

The search features are a bit wonky. It seems you can search the “feed directory” very easily. However, when I changed to view the users directory, that search option flipped me back to the feeds. So, searching for a user is a process of paging through gobs of pages, by first letter, in hopes that you know how the person you’re looking for spelled their name… Not so swell.

Bloglines was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher, the former CEO of ONElist (acquired by Yahoo! in 2000 and now operating as Yahoo! Groups). The company is a property of Ask Jeeves, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI). and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can find out more about Ask Jeeves at www.ask.com and IAC at www.iac.com. You can read Mark Fletcher’s personal blog at www.wingedpig.com. Or contact user support.

One Response to “RSS Reading / BlogLines / Pocket PC”

1. Chad Gniffke on January 22nd, 2006 10:41 pm
   

   Great post! I see this has a growing issue in the future. Once RSS feeds become business critical a centralized system will be necessary. Can you say Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP3?

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