I’ve been using Newsgator for almost 2 years now. I liked it so much when I tried it out, that I dropped the $30 to purchase it. Newsgator gave me the ability to pull down all my blogs and RSS feeds into Outlook, so it looked pretty much just like mail. Then I learned about their on-line service and how their two products sync together, and I was very happy. I could read using Outlook at work, through the web on the weekends. And it worked great, for a while.

The sync only every kinda worked. If you talk to Newsgator, they will say that it works as advertised. I content that it doesn’t work like it should. If the Outlook version already pulled down a post, it doesn’t appear on-line. It didn’t help me much.

They also changed their pricing model to a subscription service. They promised some way of making existing customers happy with their new model, but I don’t think they could have sated me. Just what I need, another subscription service…

I also started having problems when I found my self reading (scanning) 25+ blogs. I had a hard time finding my new content from all the content I had already read. I looked (in vain) for some way of making it only show new content, but was unsuccessful.

So I moved all my reading to BlogLines today, and I’m not looking back. While I gave up some nice things like being able to easily forward things to my coworkers, I got a bunch of nice new features. I now only view feeds that actually have new content. The folder system is a real nice way of combining related feeds so they are read as one. And it is all web based, so it is always in sync with itself (including on my cell phone). Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that it is free?

Check out BlogLines today!

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It’s about time that the Daily Pennsylvania (Penn’s Student Newspaper) has an RSS Feed feed. I looked into it over a year ago and actually went to the effort to write my own script to generate an RSS feed from their HTML. Of course my script broke as soon as they changed their layout and I gave up trying to keep it up to date.

So check it out, subscribe to it, keep up to date on Penn Happenings (of course they wait until after Football and Basketball season, but at least it will be around for next year).

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Apple has a RSS feed generator for iTMS. Pick your genre, pick what kind of things you want included (new releases, new tracks add to iTMS, top songs, etc.), and it will give you a URL to add to your News Aggregator of choice.

Link

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I don’t know when the GMail team slipped this feature, but GMail has an RSS feed for what looks to be the unopened mail items in your inbox. Of course it is an authenticated feed (you don’t want everyone to read about your penis enlargement order), so make sure your News Aggregator supports it.

I stumbled upon this because Firefox put up the “RSS enabled” icon in the lower right hand corner of the status bar, but it looks like GMail even has a help topic for it.

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