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NewsGator vs. Bloglines

Ben asked me earlier why he should use NewsGator Online over Bloglines. Hmmm. When I wrote my earlier post about NewsGator Online, I didn’t think of it as an “either or” sort of thing – I spotted NewsGator Online, I liked the clean interface (oh! Look! Pretty colors!) and I signed up – as “christine,” which is still pretty shocking. Then I wrote my first post about it.

Now I’ve had some more time to poke around and check things out. I like the interface that allows you to sort feeds into folders (I think it’s less clunky then bloglines.) I didn’t like how I had to hunt for the Bookmarklet to use to subscribe to feeds on the fly. However, I think I just found the coolest part of NewsGator…

You can sync with all the different options, including FeedDemon. Read feeds here, read feeds there, sync up. If you used their NewsGator for Outlook version (a fee service) along with the online system, you could sync up what you had read. Even better though, FeedDemon can sync with your NewsGator Online subscription.

I took a long time to warm up to Bloglines because I generally hesitate to use online services for things like that. I worry about what will happen when they go down – I’ll be stuck high and dry without my feeds. For a long time, I stuck with my desktop feed reader, and my only issue with it was if I read something on one computer, it was still marked as unread on my other computer. Blech. Who wants to double read?

So if you use FeedDemon on your desktop along with a NewsGator Online subscription – you don’t have to worry about that any more. Just sync them up. How great is that?

If I had known about this a month ago, I would have skipped over Bloglines. This solution meets every need I had – and then some. But I’ll save that gem for another day. (Sign up for your own NewsGator Online account and see if you can figure it out!)

(Pssst… wondering what the heck RSS even is? Learn more. Read blogs, news, and content easier. Have a MT v2.6x powered blog and an RSS feed? How about a full post feed? (Excerpts are annoying, if you ask me.) Get a better template for your blog.)

By Christine

Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.

9 replies on “NewsGator vs. Bloglines”

Thanks for the comments. A couple of corrections. Feed Demon does indeed sync with Bloglines. There’s also an Outlook plugin that syncs with Bloglines (http://www.blogbot.com), as well as many other programs (see http://www.bloglines.com/services for a partial listing and a description of our open API). Plus, Bloglines has several features that Newsgator doesn’t have (like a blog for every user) or that they require a fee for (like search feeds, which are free in Bloglines).

But again, I appreciate the comments. We’re always looking for ways to improve Bloglines.

Thanks for the info, Mark! I have been using Bloglines for a month or two now, and have never seen mention of these features, so I was unaware of them. I appreciate you pointing them out! (I hope they are better highlighted in the future.)

As for the free blog included with each account … I never really got that feature. I have a blog already; if I wanted to post to a blog, I would post here.

I signed up for a Newsgator account… bleh. They will succeed with their commercial tie-ins, but their interface is too layer-intensive.

I much prefer Bloglines’ minimalistic interface. It does the things that I want, like mark read-items as ‘read’… With NewsGator’s website, I have to click an icon to mark *each* post as ‘read’… totally non-intuitive…

Actually, you can marke all as read – it’s at the top. (You don’t have to mark them individually.) I preferred that actually – that way I can click, glance at what is there, and if I want to go back and read it, it’s still there. I’ve always hated that it disappears for me in Bloglines – I’ve had the site load slowly, and then … zoom! The feed is gone.

Obviously, things like that are all a matter of user preference, of course.

I’m with don, I’d prefer that it automatically mark whatever I’ve read ‘as read’, instead of my having to do it manually.

What if you’ve got 50 subscriptions, then by the time you got to the last one, so you could mark them as ALL READ, any new posts that came in between the time you started and finished would also be marked as read? We’d miss posts that way.

Bloglines DOES take forever to load the left pane, even with folders, unless you’ve got the option set to SHOW ONLY UPDATED FEEDS selected.

As far as full vs excerpts, unless it’s under a paragraph or two, I prefer excerpts, but the best is having a choice between the two.

I’m still giving NewsGator a practice run though, thanks for the heads up =D

I don’t think I understood what you wrote about the “marking all read”. Because now that I’ve gone back there, I have to mark each site as read with an extra click, and wait for it to reload. SIGH!

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