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The New Bloglines Web Services API
Marc Hedlund writes "Bloglines, everyone's favorite RSS aggregator, changed the RSS world again today by releasing the Bloglines Web Services APIs. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Blogbot will all be adding support for the APIs so that users can store their feed state on Bloglines, and read their feeds from any browser. I posted an article introducing the APIs, including a full three-pane desktop aggregator source code example, on the the O'Reilly site."
I just installed the newest preview release and was floored to discover that it's got an RSS aggregator built right in!
You can set up subscriptions to your favorite feeds just and get them refreshed with your mail and newsgroups.
Pretty danged nifty, IMHO
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
If I want to see what's new, I want to see the newest stuff across my feeds, not have to click each feed to view the newest posts for each one separately. Unless I've missed something on Bloglines it doesn't offer me this view.
That said, these APIs might convince me to roll my own aggregator for my own use....
While this may be a highly enlightened point of view, it's also important to note that RSS feed aggregators like Bloglines offer much, much more than subscribing simply to blogs. The name of Bloglines is misleading; my account feeds me some blogs, but also lots of other great content.
On a related note, I've noticed most RSS clients have no support for cookies. Bad news if you read blogs that have friends-only posts which you can only view when logged in.
But with Thunderbird there is a workaround for it. Just copy cookies.txt from your Firefox or Mozilla profile folder into your Thunderbird profile! Then you'll be able to see all the posts you have permission to view, not just public ones. Just make sure you have set an option to remain logged for future sessions before copying the file.
I'm a bit of a news junky, but bouncing around checking all the different news sites whenever something happens is just to time consuming
Even more fun is when you're trying to remember that article you read last week, but is now lost in the oblivion that is anything not on the front page of the news site
so i threw together a little site that dumps all my favorite sites newsfeeds into a database where I can do whatever I want with it
though it's nowhere near as fully featured as I'd like, it does the job
all it really needs is some filtering to prevent when it overwhelms you with so much news
nothing fancy but it keeps me sane =)
My favourite RSS aggregator is Livejournal.
I get all my news, links and comics there, courtesy of RSS.
And I can get to them anywhere there's a web connection.
My Journal
Whatever fuck bloggers
That you Dan Rather?
...had you read the article or checked out the Bloglines site, you would've seen that Bloglines _IS_ a web-based aggregator.
I am one of those readers to whom reading by headline is practically impossible: I read by viewing the content in the aggregate, not by actually reading every headline.
None of the three-pane readers work for me, then. They force me to click on a headline, read its contents. Then click on another one, then read that.
Nobody writes good headlines. So when the mass of information reaches a certain level (anything above half a screenful or so of entries), it becomes chaotic, anonymous and uninteresting. I have the same problem with newsgroups and mailing lists.
So Bloglines solves that. However, it has an extremely vicious interface deficiency: it automatically marks everything you see as read by default, even if you haven't read it.
Come on, that's crazy. It has a tiny checkbox next to each entry in order to allow me to keep it unread. Crazy. It means that if I click on a feed and then change my mind about reading it right now, the entire read state of that screwed.
Instead, it should provide a reasonably large clickable surface allowing me to mark something as read, preferably by immediately hiding -- or collapsing into a very small space -- the entry using DHTML/CSS.
Since I can't use Bloglines, can anyone recommend a newspaper-style feed reader on Windows? I've tried BlogExpress, which is friendly and streamlined, but it uses IE as its HTML browser, which is not something I want to touch.
Great tip. However, I still regard it as a bug in Thunderbird that it does not properly interoperate with Firefox, including cookies. I'd report it as a bug if I could find my way to the right Bugzilla.
I agree. I'd like to see something like an "Import Firefox cookies for this site" option when adding a new subscription in Thunderbird. The current workaround is functional but certainly not ideal.