My addiction to RSS feeds didn't really start until last year; late enough that it likely excludes me from the uber-geek category. I tried a number of tools and readers in my quest for a great news reader. A few early favourites were NewsGator (before I finally left Microsoft Outlook behind forever , thank you very much - more on that in a later post), FeedReader, and NewsMonster. That's not all I tried, but that hits the highlights. They all came the same problems - sometimes I find great feeds at home, sometimes I find great feeds at work, and keeping the two sync'ed were a hassle in some readers, a nightmare in others.

Other pet peeves were how things were categorized - early releases of FeedReader didn't allow me to sort my categories, they simply showed up in the order I originally made them. NewsMonster was hooked into the incredibly slooooow Netscape, which I discussed in a previous post was just too clunky for my needs.

I did gasp and pant over FeedDemon, incredibly pretty, when it was still in Beta, but by the time it was released yet another tool had stolen my heart and become one of My Favourite Tools. :)

Bloglines is a web-based RSS reader, which solved my primary problem of location, location, location. Over time, it's become a treasured tool simply because of the great features it adds as it evolves.

Features I've found invaluable include:

RSS Feed Management - I can move or copy feeds to other folders, sort the feeds in several different ways, import and export my feeds, rename easily, all the basic management tools that make handling 120+ feeds easy.

Ability to share my feeds easily - There's a public link to my feeds (which I've now included permanently in the sidebar) so you, too, can see all the incredibly overwhelming yet very cool stuff I get delivered daily. More importantly, I can keep some feeds private if I don't think they're for public consumption. And they've just added a feature that allows me to send subscriptions to certain feeds to my friends. Nifty.

Email subscriptions - This is the biggie. They create a unique email address for you, on the fly, so you can subscribe to different newsletters. Given that I receive 50+ newsletters a week between work and home, this is invaluable. Now I can see them all in one place, read them when I'm ready without cluttering my inbox, and delete them without overloading my trash folder (I usually keep my deleted stuff for quite a while in case I need to refer to it unexpectedly). There is one caveat - right now, you can't respond to emails you receive which means you can't sign up for double opt-in newsletters, but the Bloglines site says this feature is coming soon. I wait with bated breath.

Bloglines isn't perfect yet, which I've discussed before. My biggest beef with the service is the great big top frame which serves little purpose other than branding. The very first thing I do every time I bring up my feeds is drag the frame all the way to the top so it doesn't take up any of my browsing space. I'd love to see the ability to customize the interface so I could forgo that big top bar, and maybe tweak the fonts to the styles/sizes I prefer for browsing.

But really, the service is excellent, incredibly so because it's free. If they offer a paid service (which I've heard rumours they may do) I'll be signing up for sure. And while I don't yet subscribe to any Atom feeds, I was pleasantly surprised to find they support Atom feeds right now (as opposed to other readers which I've read don't have support just yet).

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