First, I hate Bloglines. Then, I hate it some more. When it seems like my hate has come to a simmer, it flares up once again. Somehow, I manage to find patience and forgiveness for a product that has mostly served me well.
No more. While this isn’t a new occurrence, it’s been happening A LOT lately. For whatever reason, Bloglines is showing me feed items twice. Not like in the past where I’d read it and then it would show up as unread later on. I mean they’re showing it to me twice right in the app. Look at the screenshot (click it for a bigger view). That’s Engadget. For whatever reason, most of the posts being shown to me are being shown twice.
It’s been going on for over a week now. At first I just thought that something might be wrong with the Engadget feed. I thought maybe it wasn’t Bloglines’ fault. I’d believe that if not for the fact that I saw it in more than one feed. It seems to happen more often in Engadget than in other feeds, but I’ve definitely seen it in other feeds.
So I’m left with a dilemma. I have the tools. I have the talent. I can write my own aggregator. I can take an open source aggregator and install it. I can suck it up and stick it out with Bloglines. I can write my own OPML import for Yahoo! Mail Beta. I hate every one of those ideas.
So instead I’ll sleep on it and maybe something will come to me in the morning.
i gave up on bloglines a long time ago. too many bugs, too slow on updates. i wish that they would spend some time improving the thing because when it works, it is awesome. i switched over to using tiny tiny rss (http://tt-rss.spb.ru/trac/) which i run on my own server for myself. it is a nice simple rss reader using touches of ajax to make things function.
I’m with you there mookie. When Bloglines is working right, it’s great. I was looking at Tiny Tiny RSS a little while ago. One thing that might cause me some issues is that it’s PHP 4 only, because of the dependency on DOMXML. I’m using PHP 5 on my hosting provider. I could set up a seperate virtual host and run PHP 4 on it.
We’ll see. I’ve been looking at Magpie as well and I’ve been thinking I might just go ahead and write my own aggregator.
I know Ken wrote an aggregator that he’s been happy with. Its a prototype but you might be able to prod him into cleaning it up and making an install for you to use.
I vote for the write your own route.
I have Tiny Tiny RSS running fine with my PHP 5.0.x installation on my server. I think TTRSS uses Magpie in the background to gather up everything.
Huh, I’ll have to give it a try then. I assumed when I read the docs that they had a hard dependency on DOMXML.
Sure enough, if you try OPML import it will fail:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: domxml_open_file() in /home/.garibaldi/rckenned/beta.unclehulka.com/ttrss/opml.php on line 114
That’s one of the pieces that still depends on PHP 4. The core of the app still seems to work, though. I should just update OPML import for PHP 5 and submit it as a patch to the maintainer.
Ryan, I just came across the following review of FeedLounge. Doesn’t sound too bad (haven’t tried it though).
http://rss.weblogsinc.com/2006/01/28/feedlounge-is-ajaxian-answer-to-desktop-rss-readers/
Screw that. I’d accept some ads, but I’m not going to pay for a feed reader.