Syndirella: I'm Converted

I've tried the news aggregator thing: AmphetaDesk and Aggie insisted on displaying my news in my browser, and I couldn't deal with that. I used NetNewsWire Lite on my brother's Mac for awhile over winter break, and I probably could have fallen in love with it, but I wouldn't allow myself; I don't have a Mac of my own. I tried NewsGator in Outlook, and liked what I was seeing, but I still wasn't hooked. I didn't consider any of this a problem, because my method of keeping a group of Mozilla bookmarks handy to peruse my blogs of choice has worked quite well for a long time.

Then Syndirella came along.

After importing my feed list from NewsGator, it took me less than a few hours to become completely dependent upon Syndirella. I used it almost exclusively to read news this past weekend, and spent quite a bit of time on Syndic8 looking for scraped feeds of sites that don't provide one (Neil Gaiman, anyone?).

I realized the problem with my scheme this morning as I opened my browser window here at work: I could download Syndirella here, but I have no way of marking articles that I have already read. So, because Syndirella is free software, I began brainstorming ways to store this information on a server somewhere. Yeah, it's written with .Net, which I don't understand, but that shouldn't stop me from making it what I need it to be.

Then I stumbled upon Brad Choate's wishlist for Syndirella, and this particular request was included. Dmitry, the head of the Syndirella project, has responded to each of the requests and confirmed that many of Brad's suggestions (including the remote storage of feed data) will be included in future versions of Syndirella.

My biggest problem at this point is figuring out to do with all of the time I have now that I no longer need to read every blog on my blogroll when I want to catch up on news.

January 27, 2003 - 09:08 AM