There's been a lot of commentary around the net about the unfortunate events surrounding Dave Winer's abrupt closure of weblogs.com, but if you haven't yet read about it, best places to start are posts by David Weinberger, and Tom Matrullo.
I was gonna write a post about the nature of responsibility, and how when you offer to help someone you take on a responsibility to not dump them in the shit without warning (whether you like that responsibility or not), but I think there's enough stuff been said already about Weblogs.Gate.
None of it, though, is quite as eloquent as Dan's rather spiffy mashup.
Says it all.
I've just updated FireFox to version 0.9 and downloaded an RSS reader extension. I love FireFox – so much sexier than IE, so much less bloated than Netscape, it really is a good browser and if you haven't converted yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. (Please see update below.)
I wish I could say something similar about an RSS reader. I initially tried Syndirella – a desktop app that acted both as RSS checker and browser. I liked Syndirella because it told me when sites had updated but also allowed me to actually view the blog, not just the results of the feed. There's something more satisfying about reading blogs as their author intended them to be read, with all the design and pictures and fandangles (and sometimes, actual content) that are on the blog itself but which get stripped out of the RSS feed. Sadly, Syndirella was highly unstable and crashed more often than it worked, so that got ditched.
I looked at a few other readers before setting on Bloglines. Bloglines is good. I liked Bloglines. But it never really satisfied my blog reading needs – it restricts me to whatever is in the RSS feed, and accessing the actual blog page from the RSS feed is a clumsy, involving opening links in new tabs and not always getting the site but sometimes getting the feed instead. Plus it would delete from the history any feeds I'd already read, which is ok, I guess, but sometimes I'd want to go back and check something and I'd have to dig for it. Not far, admittedly, but enough so that it irritated me. I'm a one click kinda gal – I like instantaneousness in my browsing.
What I had been wanting is for Blogrolling to add a little bit more functionality to their service. I have a Blogrolling sidebar in FireFox, which is just great, but it only ever tells me when a site has 'new' content according to the time limit I have set. I wish instead that they would implement basic aggregator functionality, indicating when something is new to me (not in terms of time), how many new items there are, and then de-highlight when I've read them. That way I could bypass RSS feeds altogether and just go straight from my Blogroll sidebar to the site itself.
But having installed this RSS feed reader into FireFox, I now have something which is equal to, or possibly even better than that. I add my feeds to a folder in my bookmarks which gets displayed in the sidebar. When I click on the feed, I get the feed content displayed in the main window, and the post titles displayed in a small window at the bottom of the sidebar. When I click on a post title, that post in its original blog format is displayed in the main window. So I get both the RSS feed – which is very nicely displayed, btw – to skim through, and the option of reading the post in its natural habitat if I wish. And it's all very easy, simple, clean and effective.
The advantage of using FireFox's bookmarks is that it means I can add folders, sort and generally manage my feeds much more easily than in Bloglines. The drawback of this particular extension is that I have to actually tell it to check for new posts – it doesn't automatically check every hour or whatever. UPDATE: Thanks to Mark in the comments who gives me this nugget: “To have the feeds checked automatically you can right click the feed in the sidebar and you get a menu with schedules etc.”. Cool! Basically, this is even better than automatic checking because it allows me to specify how often I want each feed checked. Feeds I am addicted to can be checked more often than those I only read occasionally. Sounds perfect to me! (And my bad for not exploring all my contextual menus thoroughly before posting!)
Another small hiccup is that the OPML import function doesn't seem to work, which means I have to bookmark sites by hand. Maybe that's not such a bad thing – it'll force me to sort out what is, at the moment, a horrible morass of feeds.
Other than that, though, the functionality is great. I have a feeling I'm going to be moving over from Bloglines, even if it does take me a while to migrate all the feeds.
UPDATE (18 June): I haven't had any major problems with FireFox 0.9, i.e. it hasn't crashed on me, but quite a few people on IRC have had big hassles. The one thing that did annoy me about it was the way that it forceda new window when I opened links from other applications, but that was fixed by the installation of Tabbrowser Extensions. Unfortunately, that solution appears to have b0rked Bloglines.
Verdict: I still love FireFox, just not ver 0.9. May even look into going back a version.
Lesson learnt: Don't get too enthusiastic about an update to your favourite toy until you have first broken it.
UPDATE (23 December): This article's probably out of date now, but you might also be interested in a more recent piece on my Strange Attractor blog aboud my switch from Bloglines to NetNewsWire, and the fact that those two are going to be working together so that you can read blogs both on- and offline from the same list of feeds.
