Hugo’s blog

Ponyfish allows one to create an RSS feed for any page in just a few clicks.

You paste the URL of the page you’d like to create a feed for. The page is shown to you. You then click on links that you want to have in the RSS feed, and Ponyfish creates a URL pattern that matches those, which is then used to build an RSS feed.

I tried it on Robert Gil’s photo site. In a few clicks, and after having tweaked the pattern slightly (e.g. the pattern for dates was 2006-05-0* that I generalized), I obtained an RSS feed for it. The problem I found is that, as the link is an an img tag, the title of each entry is the URL of the thumbnail for each gallery (e.g. http://lockuhomm.free.fr/MICKEY%203D/PARIS%20-%20Zenith%20-%202006-05-03/vignette/2006-05-03-0184.gif) instead of the name of the gallery itself (MICKEY 3D). I suspect that for most sites, titles of links will be more meaningful than this.

I’ve been reading feeds with Vienna and it’s worked well except for one thing: it forces me to read the news and people’s ramblings on my laptop. So I thought: why not use this thing called the Web to do that and not be bothered by the software I’m running anymore?

After all, lots of people use BlogLines, so why not me? I tried BlogLines a long time ago. The same way I had tried del.icio.us a long time ago, tried it again recently, and discovered that I actually wanted to use it that the interface had improved a lot.

So I started using BlogLines again. But the difference with del.icio.us is the following: I don’t think that the interface has improved that much from what I vaguely remember, and I found it pretty slow compared to Vienna (but I shouldn’t be too surprized by that).

It was enough for me to try out other solutions. So I went on a mission, and I tried a number of online feed readers. What I was after was something close to Vienna:

• NewsIsFree: I didn’t like the tabbed interface; I’m too used to the column-based one from Vienna.
• Google Reader: it has a very fancy and cool-looking interface, but, again, I’m used to a two column-based view, with folders and a clear view of what is unread, so that I can choose what I want to read; the 3-pane (or is it 4?) view didn’t work for me. It did have keyboard shortcuts that help making you (Unix geek) at home.
• NewsGator: NewsGator is pretty neat, but has some drawbacks. The separation between posts is not obvious, and it’s really slow. That’s a shame.
• RoJo: Rojo is all-in-all pretty neat. I didn’t find how to show older articles first, though, and everytime I come back, all my folders (well, tags, on RoJo) are collapsed, so I can’t have a good view of what is available.
• Pluck: Pluck looks a lot like a deskptop application, but every operation (e.g. folder expansion) seems to require talking to the server, the number of unread items is not indicated in a feed, which makes it painful to use.
• BlogLines: this was my starting point; though I’m not a fan of frames, the interface is simple and works well. It doesn’t look as fancy as the others, and rearranging feeds is painful, but it does what it claims to do well: present you your unread news clearly. And it has very handy keyboard shortcuts to navigate your news, which is a huge plus for me.

I don’t pretend to have done an extensive study here. I’ve mostly used the default options, and may have missed some cool features. Also, some of those sites are more than just RSS readers and have community tools, in particular Rojo, but I ignored those as it wasn’t what I was after.

So BlogLines is the one for me. Looking at others, and to borrow an expression from Carson Kressley, I think that it would deserve some jujing up of its interface, but maybe we would loose without some usability and speed which are the most important aspect for me.

Rojo came in second for me, and may actually become number one. I’ll keep an eye on it. The Google Reader looks promising.