Aggregators and blogging tools

Via anti-mega I just dis­cov­ered that Blog­lines redesigned.

Blog­lines has redesigned, and added some more func­tion­al­ity. It has replaced Net­NewsWire as my RSS reader of choice, mainly due to speed rea­sons (NNW couldn’t cope with my 500ish feeds), and the fact I need access on sev­eral com­put­ers (and not just Mac OS).

It looks nice and a lot more pro and pol­ished now. I’ve writ­ten about how cool Blog­lines is before (if not I should have), how­ever I’m using Shrook now as I wanted to try a desk­top client for a bit and really liked the inter­face. So far I’m quite pleased with it and as I’m almost exclu­sively using one com­puter now synch­ing isn’t a prob­lem. If I need that, Shrook offers shrook.com — a web-based synched reader. Not as nice as Blog­lines, but it’ll do. I haven’t got 500+ feeds, more like 300, but it’s defi­nately a point that desktop-based aggre­ga­tors seem to choke a bit on the heavy load. I’ve tried them all and it’s basi­cally the same. Shrook’s dis­trib­uted check­ing is work­ing quite well, though. It’s a mem­ory hog but as I haven’t put in that extra RAM as planned, that’ll prob­a­bly won’t be real prob­lem in the near future.

What I miss though is the cool new fea­tures added to Blog­lines on a reg­u­lar basis, and the lit­tle tools mak­ing sub­scrib­ing and blog­ging eas­ier. Shrook lets you con­nect to an exter­nal blog­ging tool, so I’ve got ecto set up which is really quite cool but it’s still a bit rough around the edges…

I’m using Fire­fox as my main browser (and so should you) — but ecto only lets you blog directly from Safari. Which is also great…but isn’t my browser of choice. (on top of that, I havent even got the Safari/ecto combo to work). I’m also hav­ing some trou­ble fig­ur­ing out how to keep my pref­er­ences (some­how they go miss­ing once in a while) and blog­ging from Shrook seems to work best the sec­ond time you do it. It’ll open ecto for you but the inser­tion of text and links only works sec­ond time around.

So, besides a few minor bugs here and there, I’m pretty happy with my setup. The inter­faces of both pro­grams are well done, and I like hav­ing both of them run­ning in the back­ground, allow­ing me to quickly do some blog­ging or blog check­ing. The extra fea­tures (blog edit­ing, image upload etc.) is really con­ve­nient and once the inte­gra­tion gets tighter and I find a few extra tools (one of them being an eas­ier way of sub­scrib­ing), every­thing is dandy.

Fea­ture wish: Some “Added within the last X days”-thingie that would gen­er­ate a blog post with links, allow­ing you to punch in your rea­sons for adding them to your blog roll so every­one else could dis­cover them as well. Until I find that or find a way to hack it up myself, I’ll just try and remem­ber to do it manually.