I have been becoming increasingly annoyed with Google Reader of late, primarily because of one issue. I have on multiple occasions noticed a glitch in the software where Reader will report a number new articles are available, only to throw up “has no unread items” when you click to read. I have verified the issue on two separate computers on two separate networks, so I’m pretty confident that the issue is backend related.
It finally reached peak point one evening last week when Reader took the better part of 20 minutes to deliver the feed after advertising it. Enough, said I to myself, is enough. Its time to go look for an alternative. I had seen Bloglines pop up quite a bit, so I decided to give that a try first.
Bloglines
Easily, easily my biggest gripe with the original version of Bloglines is the exceptionally annoying “function” of automatically marking all items in a selected feed or folder as read as soon as you select it. Why? Why would you do this? What sense could this make? Some of the feeds I subscribe to can get quite large, especially as I tend to ignore feeds like Digg, Slashdot and Reddit at the weekend. And should Scoble go on a link rampage, God help us all. And a folder could contain several large feeds. So if I click on any of those, they’re all “read” now. Heaven forbid the browser should lock up, the page refreshes or I somehow click into something else – everything is gone.
I spent a bit of time pouring over the Bloglines options to switch this off. This alone was enough to make me want to forgive Google Reader it’s sins and go running back. But going back to try it one more time, I noticed a small link on the Bloglines frontpage. “Bloglines Beta – Give it a spin today!”
Bloglines Beta
Going from Bloglines to Bloglines Beta is quite like meeting someone, dating for a short bit, and walking her home only to meet her younger, more attractive sister with whom you happen to have much more in common standing at the door.
There is much to admire about the new version of the service. The feed list on the left of the screen is nicely laid out. Javascript fades out folders and feeds that have been emptied, rolling the next feed down the list over it. Favicons are shown where available.
The river of news section is nice and big and gives just enough extra information such as when the post was originally posted and when it was last updated. Quick look mode gives you just the header information. And then there is the 3-pane mode.
The 3-pane mode is a wonderful creation. The top pane is the Quick header information, the bottom pane gives you two further viewing options, the default Full view from the feed, or the option to load the site page the feed was generated from without having to leave the reader page. The bottom pane can fold right over the top, giving you all the space you need to be able to read from the site page. Nice.
You can save feeds to the Saved list, and append a little note to remind you why you decided to save it in the first going down. You can also pin feeds to the river, marking them as read but keeping them listed as interesting (similar to Google Reader’s star functionality).
They also support login by OpenID. However, this seems a little bit half-baked as you have to create an account first and bind an OpenID to it, rather than being able to create an account using an id. Hopefully this will be fixed in future.
But its not all good yet
That said, Bloglines Beta is still showing some of the bat-shit crazy characteristics of her older sister.
I’m on a Mac primarily both at work and at home these days, and that means Safari. Bloglines Beta is heavily AJAX, and some of that Javascript doesn’t appear to be Safari friendly. In particular, saving options almost never works. I like to have my feeds ordered starting with the oldest post, and while Bloglines beta offers this option, it never saves it. I make the change, it sorts them, I click the feed again, old option loads. A little annoying. Its also not possible for me to change my account information, always throwing a “Communication with Server” error.
Thinking that it might just have been an issue with Safari, I downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 5, as well as the Firefox 2 based Prism. I experienced the same issues with each of these browsers as well, suggesting the problem might be with Bloglines itself.
Bloglines indexing is also quite something. I opened it one evening there to find that it had pulled in several months worth of several feeds. This, in spite of the fact that I had just opened my account and imported my OPML feed a couple of days before hand.
Guys, I had an OPML feed. Doesn’t that suggest to you that I have spent some time reading blogs before? If you’re going to pull down feeds, pull them down to within a week or two of my account creation or OPML upload. I don’t want to have to be looking at threads from November 2006 just because they happen to exist.
One final gripe. What do the developers of Bloglines have against native widgets? Every button is an image, and in my experience the entire button doesn’t seem to respond to a click event. There are “hotspots” that have to be hit just right, not that anything actually happens when you do mind.
Conclusion
Bloglines has the potential to be great. I could see myself using it. But there is still some work to be done. I have no idea how far along the Beta process the live version is, though new features seem to be being added on a monthly basis. There appears to be some very fundamental work to be done. But what does work works great, and for that alone I have been continuing to work with it, though not at the same “open all day” regularity that I was with Google Reader. Maybe thats no bad thing.
Maybe some day Bloglines, maybe some day.
