Kicking Bloglines to the Curb
November 26, 2005
Ah Bloglines…
I remember when we were both young (was it only spring of last year?), and I was so fond of you…
You were new, you were fresh — you did things for me that no other feed reader did.
For you, I swore off my favorite local feed reader applications. I learned to appreciate frames and funky javascript all over again.
I sang your praises to my friends — hell, to anyone who’d listen.
Sorry to say, though — I’m done with you.
Why?
Because you’ve been seeing too many other people. You’ve been peddling your services all over town, and as a result, you just don’t seem to have enough left for me.
I sat and watched for hours yesterday, while not a single feed on my (admittedly way too long list) was updated.
Was nobody on the entire f’ing ‘net posting anything?
Nope — they were posting, you just weren’t updating.
I understand it’s tough to grow a service, but this has happened way too much lately, and so I’m going to step aside and let you put your efforts into supporting all your new friends.
I’d like to say that it’s not you, it’s me, but the fact is — it’s you.
What about me?
I’ve met somebody new — Gregarius.
Admittedly, my new baby is a little bit high maintenance — heck, I had to download and install it in its own place, before we even had our first date.
But the upside of that is that I know that with Gregarius, I’m the one-and-only.
I still have all of the advantages of a web based feed reader — I can read from anywhere, and all of my ‘last reads’ are up to date, but I’m not competing for resources with anyone but myself.
Seriously tho…
It’s taking a little getting used to — the interface is quite a bit different, full of Ajax goodness instead of frames and last-year’s javascript, and there are still a few quirks, but for the most part, it’s awfully good.
Gregarius isn’t for everyone — you’ve got to have a server running Apache and PHP to install it on (but it’s a dirt simple install), and it’s still a little rough around the edges (it doesn’t deal with poorly formatted feeds gracefully, for example), but it has a lot of promise.
Even better, it’s got a growing library of templates and plugins that let you make it behave your way.
If you’re geeky enough to be able to run your own web-based feed reader, then Gregarius just might be worth having a look.
Gregarius - A Free Web-Based Feed Aggregator
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