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April 5, 2004

Well I bought an RSS reader and already regret it

So I had winnowed the RSS reader search down to FeedDemon and NewsGator. I have been traveling for two weeks, so I haven't really had time to do a head to head comparison, and had only played with each for about two hours. My trial on both ran out, so I had to bite the bullet. My decision criteria really wasn't that complicated. I didn't want another icon on my desktop, so I went with the Outlook plugin. Plunked down $29 for NewsGator. They should change their name. Gator is a bad word.

The first sign of trouble was in configuring postings out of the thing. With FeedDemon, they had a handy feature where they just auto discovered your posting app (I have been using w.Bloggar) and they automatically set it up. Well NewsGator doesn't work with w.Bloggar and you have to install another app from another guy: public MattBerther : ISerializable: MovablePoster. This plug-in is free now, but no gaurantee of how long. And it is definitely beta stuff. It took three trips to the support boards to get it working and configured correctly. And when you do post, NewsGator conveniently slaps it's "related" link on my posts which encourage people on my blog to click through to NewsGator's on-line services. Now I paid for my software and I don't want to be a shill for their viral marketing please. I haven't found where to turn this off yet. Also, this plug-in formats posts VERY differently than Bloggar and the difference is obvious. Now I am sure that with some programming in the template I could fix that, but I am a busy guy. This is alot of braindamage for a simple thing. Oh, and the "post to my blog" tab is well hidden in a couple of NewsGator menus. It is not a right-click option or an easy to find button on a menu bar. Why not?

I also have noticed that my outlook has slowed down considerably. Right now I am working over a VPN from home to the office server. I bet NewsGator is pulling everything from the net and putting it on my server then sending it along to my client. In that respect, a separate application would be better because they would just pull directly to the client and bypass the VPN/server. When I was running it, FeedDemon was very fast. Then there is the problem of new postings to my RSS feeds. With FeedDemon I got a cute pop-up window from the taskbar for new posts like I do when I get new e-mail. Of course this can be turned off. In News Gator it can't be turned on or off, it is not available. Another feature I kinda liked in FeedDemon was the ability to define a category of feeds and have the application assemble a "newspaper" for you with all the recent posts. Very cool.

FeedDemon also did a very good job of auto discovering the different RSS and Atom formats and finding the right place for a feed. NewsGator is very touchy that you get the stuff exactly right.

And then there is the problem of business model. With NewsGator you have to pay extra for things like reading your feeds in a browser, and custom searches. Many other readers offer that free. I hope some of this gets included, there will definitely be price pressure to do so.
Wow, sounds like I should have bought FeedDemon eh? Well I am an American at heart and am easilly swayed by convenience. Lured in with a promise of easy integration. I will stick with News Gator for awile, but may end up changing. Not sold yet. But they do have my money...

Posted by Martin at April 5, 2004 7:55 PM

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Comments

here is how i use newsgator which addresses your perf issues and your "read from a browser issue":

- set it up on a desktop machine at work. leave that machine running all the time.
- make sure that feeds are being stuffed into a folder on the exchange server, not a folder on your client machine
- when away from the office, you can use outlook over vpn to look at your folders. or OWA for web access. works fine. now newsgator is not running on these machines so you don't get the ability remotely to add new subs or to post thru newsgator (but i don't use the post feature anyway)

Posted by: John Ludwig at April 6, 2004 7:50 AM

A few comments to address your concerns:

1. There is a plug-in that will work with NewsGator for w.bloggar, if you'd like to continue using it. You can find it here: http://www.sharpreader.net/plugins.html

2. The "related" link isn't about viral marketing, believe it or not. In any case, you can remove it by changing the rendering XSLT - there are some posts on the NewsGator forums about it, I believe.

3. Slowdown problem - if you're storing news on an Exchange server, and you're connected over a VPN, then it's going to slow down a bit. Try changing your news folder to be a local PST file - then it won't have to communicate with your Exchange server, and the whole experience will likely be much faster.

4. "NewsPaper" view is accomplished with the NewsPage in NewsGator. You can even build per-folder NewsPages in NewsGator - search the forums for "NewsPgSF.htm" for details on how to set that up.

5. Discovering feeds - I really don't know what you mean here. You can right-click on a feed link in IE, and select "Subscribe in NewsGator". You can just browse to a site and click the "Subscribe in NewsGator" toolbar button in IE (you may need to add this button to the IE toolbar if you don't see it - right click on IE toolbar and select Customize), and it will find the feed for you. Was there something else you're trying to do?

Hope this helps...

Posted by: Greg Reinacker at April 6, 2004 8:31 AM

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