I’ve used a few different RSS readers over the past 12 months and I’ve finally settled on one that I like.
I tried to use Outlook 2007 but got fed up with the fact that it would all by it’s own accord stop synchronising the feeds. I tried a number of things to resolve it, but ultimately they all failed to make it work the way it was supposed to.
I tried RSS Bandit and for a long time this was my reader of choice, that is until I discovered Feedghost.
Feedghost came to me via some of my MVP buddies. They were talking about it and how it could be installed on multiple devices desktop @ home, laptop, desktop in the office and it would synchronise my feeds for me, give me the ability to tag things I wanted to go back to later and the like. So I thought, I’ll give it a go. Downloaded and installed it just fine. Then I started to have a few crashes. Now crashes of a software product normally turn me off right away. Feedghost offered to report the crashes back to the developer and I thought “Hey nothing to lose here”. I allowed it to send back to the developer. Next morning I get an email from Lee @ Feedghost asking “what’s up, what were you doing at the time of the crash etc” Wow that’s great customer service indeed. Very encouraging. So much so that I began a dialog with Lee telling him more about the problem and the like. Within another 24 hours he had found and patched the problem. Thanks Lee I thought that was great. Then I started to notice a few more issues the synchronising feature was not accurate I had different groups on my desktop vs laptop. Once more, Lee dug into it. This one was a little harder and took a little longer to resolve, but sure enough he did resolve it.
My point here is that whilst I know I can’t expect the same from Microsoft, it’s very refreshing to see results back from some of those “phone home error reports” that many software developers are integrating into their software. More impressive was to get the problems resolved quickly and get feedback from the developer as to when it would be resolved if they could not resolve it quickly.
Go on give Feedghost a try I did and I love it!
Wayne,
I used to use Newsgator and then the Outlook 2007 RSS functionality.
When Outlook was saving feeds to a PST it used to be fine but when the items were being stored in an Exchange Mailbox it used to cut my list down to about 20 feeds. It was a bug that I never managed to get resolved during the Office 2007 beta (maybe it was just somethng with my environment)
Anyway, I now use Bloglines exclusively. I have tried Google reader but don’t really get on with it. Personally, I think online RSS is best as I can access it from anywhere (even my windows mobile) and don’t have a lot of feed data clogging up my machine or mailbox.
Colin.
Have a look at http://www.bloglines.com. It is free and totally web based. That way as long as you have the Net you can read your blogs. It also has PLENTY of additional features.
Thanks
Robert Crane
I was just lamenting to Karl P. that I was getting fed up with Outlook 2007 as a RSS aggregator…not only does it simply stop synchronizing randomly, many feeds are datestamped incorrectly.
He recommended NewsGator and I have been using their Outlook product for a few days now and, while it’s okay, I’m still looking for something better. It irritates me to no end that I can’t simply create a new feed and dump the URL into it. Maybe I’m missing something but having to use the search feature each time I want to add a fee leaves a little to be desired.
I’d rather have something in Outlook, as I always have it open either on my desktop or laptop, both home and at the office.
Regards,
Darren Sargent
Except that some feeds yield posts that get truncated, including http://msmvps.com/blogs/sbsfaq/default.aspx. I also wish that I could export a subset of my feeds to OPML rather than the whole thing. I really like the WM5 implementation, though.