Feedable

 

Feedable is a nice online news aggregator. As well as having your own feeds, it also provides information on hot topics of conversation in a variety of subjects.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.

Tags: feedable, steve+rubel

FeedDemon/Newsgator Problem

Hmmm. FeedDemon has starting playing up all of a sudden. It claimed not to be able to connect to my NewsGator account a couple of times, despite the credentials being correct, and refused to do anything.

So, I removed the sync between the two and gave it another go. Now all sorts of old feeds and posts are popping up from nowhere. Most annoying.

Tags: newsgator, feeddemon

RSS habits

From Google Reader’s trends feature:

From your 238 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,827 items, starred 0 items, and shared 56 items

And I had the weekend off entirely…

I try to remember to share the stuff I find interesting.

FeedDemon Release Candidate 1

Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.

One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!

FeedDemon thoughts

Been using the FeedDemon 2.1 Beta3 for a while now. Here’s a couple of thoughts:

• Each blog post has a link to post it to del.icio.us, it’s been there for a couple of versions now. But if I click a link to another post, or to expand a summary feed, the link disappears. Can we have a link on the main toolbar to send the current page to del.icio.us, or our blogs please?
• If I clip a post in NewsGator for later viewing, can it be automatically sync’d to a News Bin in FD please?

 

Technorati tags: feeddemon, newsgator

FeedDemon and Live Writer, etc

Following Neville’s advice, I’ve downloaded the new FeedDemon beta, despite the fact that I’ve recently moved away from it in favour of Google’s Reader, and will give it a go. Sounds like it integrates well with the new Windows Live Writer – Microsoft’s entry into the offline blog editor market. I’ve tried a few editors and will give Live Writer a go too. One feature I love already is the web preview, which shows how your post will look in your template. Excellent stuff.

Talking of templates, I’ve reverted back to my old hacked version of Contempt. I just think it’s more useful, and I miss my rotating headers…

I also downloaded IE7, which has finally been released. Remarkable that it is the first full revision of the browser since 2001. Anyway, as Scoble notes, it’s too slow to replace FireFox in anyone’s estimations, especially v2 of FF, which is considerably quicker than previous versions.

Technorati tags: feeddemon, google reader, live writer, ie7, firefox

D’oh!

The Google Toolbar for Firefox has a subscribe button for RSS feeds. You can choose your aggregator from a list. Google Reader isn’t on it…

Playing with Google

Have spent a little time playing with a couple of Google products which have changed since I last used them – both for the better. Firstly, Google Reader, which was rubbish before, and now is a lot better. As is probably obvious, it’s an online RSS aggregator, like BlogLines (only a bit worse). It’s had a pretty thorough makeover, all of which makes it quicker and more user friendly. It won’t become my regular feed reader (FeedDemon at home and BlogLines on the move) but I’ll keep an eye on it. It has another use though, which I mention below…

The other thing I played with was the personalised home page. You can now have more than one page of stuff, which is nice, not least because the range of things you can do now has increased. I have set mine to to have one page with my Gmail, Calendar, BBC News headlines, del.icio.us bookmarks, and some useful searches:

Then a second page with some feeds that I regularly scan, along with a Google Reader summary of all my feeds, so I can quickly check what’s new.

The third and last page has a few games on it that have become available. Plenty of oppotunities for wasted minutes there…

I’ve added the personalised homepage to my FireFox startup pages – it’s pretty useful.

Note: I wrote this post, as I do all of mine these days, using the BlogJet editor. It automatically generated the thumbnails shown above, which is pretty cool, and makes my life easier…

The Problem with Digg

Is this sort of thing:

If you’ve ever wanted to play any of the Civilization games by Sid Meire, but were not look to shell out the cash for it, check out FreeCiv. This free GNU alternative to the popular series is just as good and just as fun.

This game can be played alone of against anyone over the internet.

Download it today! (for free of course!)

read more | digg story

As well as getting on the front page, this also gets deposited in the RSS feed. I mean, who on earth hasn’t heard of FreeCiv? The issue with having a situation where stories that appear on the front page brings with it some sort of kudos is that people will deliberately post in order to get there – and presumably there is some “you digg my posts, I’ll dig yours” going on too.

This story just isn’t news to anyone.

To Digg, or not to Digg?

Well, it’s certainly a question. When I load up my RSS aggregator (currently Bloglines – though this could change when the UK finally gets the new Newsgator look) there are always new Digg entries. When I leave it for a few hours, the limit of 200 news posts is nearly always reached.

Now, one of the criticisms, if it can be called that, of the use of the internet and technologies like RSS is that it can result in information overload. I’d generally disagree with this, but with Digg, I am afraid it’s true. The site is a victim of its own success – it’s nice to look at, easy to use and boasts some great features. But it just produces too much stuff – I can’t be faffed even to skim the feed sometimes. And then, when you see something you actually like, you can’t even read it because the so-called ‘Digg effect’ has rendered the site in question unusuable due to server pressure.

That’s why I probably still pay more attention to Slashdot that Digg. Slashdot doesn’t produce the number of posts that Digg does, largely because it has a proper focus in terms of subject matter and it has some sort of an editoral focus too – in that you know which way most of those who use and post to it lean on many issues.

As a completely non-scientific comparison, Digg has 3.909 subscribers on Bloglines, compared to Slashdot’s 66,089. There are bound to be many reasons to explain some of the difference, but I would say Digg has a lot of catching up to do.

One site I have never got round to using at all is the Tech Memeorandum. Perhaps I should subscribe and give it a go.

[tags]digg, slashdot, memeorandum[/tags]