Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
I've been looking for a method of centralising my RSS feeds for quite a while, and have found Thunderbird an excellent reader.
However, I use multiple machines and laptops and Thunderbird provides no method of sync'ing either the list of RSS feeds or which articles I've read between machines. Something like a special folder that can write to a designated IMAP server would do the job excellently, but it appears that Google have beaten the developers to the punch with Google Reader.
Firefox, my web browser of choice supports 'live bookmarks', which keep track of updates to a site, but I've been hearing good things about Google Reader so I thought I'd give it a whirl... I've not regretted it.
By creating a google account, (I phoned a friend of mine who works for Google and he's assured me that they will not at any point be stealing my soul, nor requiring my first-born for any purposes) I can now use Google reader to subscribe to all my RSS feeds. I can access them anywhere provided I have web access, and upon logging in I'm greeted with an up to date list of articles I've not yet read. Even better, I can download the last (up to) 2000 articles using Google Gears and read them even though I'm offline. Connecting to the internet once more and selecting 'online' mode synchronises the list of read/unread articles back to the server. It works perfectly on my eeePC so I'm happy with my new, ultra-mobile, globally accessible, RSS aggregator :-)
On a slightly related note, I use Foxmarks bookmark synchroniser to ensure that I have one, common set of firefox bookmarks on the multiple machines I use.
posted at: 22:15 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
