Roaming web-based RSS aggregation from Bloglines

 by Martin Belam, 25 August 2003

I think I may have found my solution to RSS aggregation. I have tried a couple of software solutions, but none have done the trick for me. This is not least because I work across a variety of physical machines and networks. I have a PC at home. I have had, until the other week, a PC at work. And I have a laptop which I use at work connected to the LAN. Or at home connected to the work network via dial-up and a firewall. Or at home, using a different profile, connected to my home dial-up ISP.

That gave me five combinations of computer / network connection, and no piece of installed software was going to sort that out. Even if you had your preferences hosted in a central location, the software would still have to guess which firewall and network I was currently using in order to reach the preferences. So I've made do with making a custom offline homepage with links through to the sites I want to visit often, which I regularly migrated across all the profiles.

Then in my referrers I noticed Bloglines, and a marriage was made in web-service-based heaven. The interface is simple and uncluttered [though admittedly unattractive and frame based. euuuewww]. It isn't feature-rich. But the effortlessness of just logging in once and making sure the cookies get set on each of my different machine/network profiles is going to make things so much easier.....

...and most importantly, it has prevented me writing my own very hacky solution.

1 Comment

hey found your post, and you look like the just the beta tester we need. MyWireService is a web-based aggregator too (without frames), and we're looking for feedback! You have certainly given this some thought, so we'd love to hear what you think or what features you are interested in. We support OPML import (click My Account, once you are registered) so getting started should be easy. We really aim to be the simple aggregator, so we default to "just the fresh news" view so there is a lot less clicking to mark stuff read, but you can let us know if we hit the mark...

just a thought, thanks!

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