I've been using Gregarius as my feed reader for many moons now. Prior to that, I used FeedOnFeeds. Both present the "river of news" style, whereby new posts are displayed in chronological order regardless of source. This is something to which I've grown accustomed. Many other aggregators I've looked at display new items only with other items from the same source; so to read all of the new items in all of the sites in my aggregator may require a fair number of mouse clicks. River of news is my preference, by far.
Unfortunately, my aggregators have repeatedly displayed the same previously read items as new items. I ditched FoF because I was tired of seeing the same things again and again. Now, Gregarius is exhibiting the same problems. It's gotten extremely bad this last couple of weeks, reporting that many posts across many sites are new, when I've already read those items several times that day! It's extremely tedious to see the say ten posts from someone's blog, which I know I've read at least five times, but Gregarius still thinks they're unread.
Frustrated, and not particularly happy about it, I tried Google Reader. It was trivially easy for me to import the OMPL of my Gregarius feeds. My initial reaction was unfavorable: the sidebar on the left wastes space; the styling of individual feed elements wastes space; the fonts are a little smaller than I'd prefer; etc etc. With my previous hosted solutions, I had the opportunity to style things to my own tastes, but with Google I only get what they give me.
Somewhat ironically, ColdForged started using Google Reader, too, and has nothing but praise for it.
After having used Google Reader for the better part of the day, today, I think I've decided that I can live with it. It hasn't shown me any duplicated content yet, which alone makes it worth the switch. The AJAX update feature is extremely handy, notifying me of new posts without me having to reload the page. As I scroll past items, Google automatically marks them as read, which is pretty handy. I'm also looking forward to trying out their mobile version on my Treo, something which has proven impractical with Gregarius.
I suppose if I were motivated enough I could construct a custom stylesheet in order to get the kind of styling I find most comfortable. That's a battle for another day, though.
You could try Google Reader Optimized, it might be to your liking.
Thanks for the suggestion, Kent! Looking through some of the other Google Reader styles, I discovered the "u" shortcut key which hides the left sidebar. That alone is enough of an improvement to not (yet) need any additional styling!
Personally I'm (only) using the add-on Stylish for FireFox 2.0 with these lines to get a more readable font:
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.google.com/reader/view/") { .entry-body { font-size:130% !important; } .entry-title { font-size: 125% !important; } }It might be something to look into if you want the feeds to be as readable as for example your own site for you. If you like keyboard shortcuts you can find them all in their FAQ if you haven't checked it out already. Merry christmas!
I don't really like Google Reader, despite its hype.
I use Netvibes for reading most of my feeds. Just today I picked up a copy of FeedDemon. It's a fantastic piece of software.
Ajay: what specifically do you dislike about Google Reader? I didn't realize there was much hype about it.
NetVibes looks even more cluttered and less immediately useful than Google Reader! I suppose there's some way to configure it to present "river of news" style output, but the jumbled home page makes me really uninterested in wading through the interface to find out how.
If you're using FeedDemon for Windows, that's out for me. First, I use GNU/Linux exclusively as my operating system. Second, I require a web-based feed reader, so that I can keep the same source of feeds read and maintained from all of the computers I use (two personal laptops, plus a desktop at work, plus now my Treo).
If you're using NewsGator Online, the web-based solution from NewsGator (creators of FeedDemon), I'd be interested in hearing your opinion; even though I'm unlikely to use it. I have a hard time paying for a service when competing free products ("as in freedom", as in the case of Gregarius; or "as in beer", as in the case with Google Reader) provide me most of what I want.
If I were willing to pay for a service, I'd likely investigate FeedLounge. But I'm ultimately not interested in paying someone to manage my feeds for me.
When you use the "River of News" display method, are you able to except certain feeds, so that they are not part of the master aggregate? For instance, I would like my main news sources (PerezHilton, Slashdot, etc) to be in the river, but others to remain apart in their own folder (LUG, Freecycle, etc). Is this possible with any web-based aggregator?
Bob: I haven't seen that feature, but I haven't been specifically looking for it.
With Google Reader, I suspect you could create this kind of configuration. Just like with GMail, you can "star" feeds, and then elect to view only starred feeds. So, I think you could star your main feeds, then leave the others unstarred. Tell Google Reader you only want to view starred items by default; and then manually view other items as you desire.
Gregarius might be able to do this, too, with tags and/or groups. These aren't features I've ever used, though, so I can't speak with authority on them.
Bob: You can do it using folders. A feed can belong to many folders so you can hopefully get it configured exactly as you want it to.
Yes, there was a hype about Google Reader, after a big update on the interface and the new features.
Yes, Google Reader does display old posts that your have read, badly, sometimes from 2004. Luckily it happens once in a while, depending on how many feeds you have subscribed to.
There's one thing Google has advantage over others, in my opinion, they have an API which is pretty useful, though it only provides snippet of a feed post, as far as I can dig into as of now.
Hey, I am from Columbus too!
I've been using FeedOnFeeds for a year or so now, and I too have seen some duplicate entries. However, every time I've looked into the downloaded XML, it is a problem on the feed source rather than on the FOF side. More often than not, the link is the only thing that changes. Perhaps I should add a unique key on the content table to prevent duplicate content...