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Thoughts and things I care to shareReview – NewsGator Online
Reviews Intro:
Now I mentioned NewsGator to a coworker awhile ago and the first question they couldn’t wait to ask is “You mean that spy ware company?”. Of course NewsGator has nothing to do with the old “Gator” spy ware stuff from many years ago, but it’s curious that people still relate the name.
At any rate, this review is one in a number (not sure how many) on free RSS Readers. There will be some online products, some offline products, and some that cross the line using features of both. Along with NewsGator Online, I’m planning on reviewing NewsAlloy, Pluck, Attensa, and as many other free news readers that I can in the next few weeks. At work, I’ve got a chance at a large team meeting at the end of April to present the virtues of news readers, and I figured I’d share that information here.
Primer
Here are some links to read up on what RSS, ATOM, Web Feeds, OPML, and news aggregators are.
About NewsGator
NewsGator has a number of feed reader products – NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox & FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macintosh. NewsGator Online is a “Web 2.0” product that uses some AJAX features in its interface. The design is similar to other online news readers where your list of feeds is on the left and the content on the right. It does not use panes or any kind of scrolling system, so your feed list on the left will move up as you scroll down in the post list of the feed.
Features
Since the product is online, you don’t need to download and install any software, set any proxy or port information, or use your bandwidth for synchronizing data. In addition, you can use the online account to sync your feeds with one of the previously mentioned “pay for” software choices above. I’ve got a coworker who uses the NewsGator Inbox and is very satisfied with it. You can import your feeds into the system and start reading right away. While the free web version does not allow you to change the update frequency of the newsfeed, the standard sync frequency seems to work fine for the average reader, however, hardcore RSS junkies will miss being in control of synchronization times.
In each post section, there are three little icons and a set of five gray stars. These tools allow you to mark individual posts as read, add the post to the “Clippings” folder, and the ability to forward the post to an email account. The stars allow you to rate the post. These ratings will flow back to the original source (if they have a NewsGator account) and also help to show other users online determine if this feed/post is of value.
The My Clippings folder is quite useful for “clipping” a favorite post and storing it for later reference. You can also syndicate your My Clippings folder in RSS, and make it available to the public. Its kind of a neat way of saving important posts from a variety of feeds.
The AJAX interface of NewsGator Online worked well in Internet Explorer, but worked better in Firefox. I believe the key on this is to have a current Java VM as AJAX makes significant use of JAVA, and my IE6SP2 install only has the limited MS Java VM installed. Some of the functionality I missed using IE6 were right-click options. These range from marking items as read, deleting, moving, expanding/collapsing, Unsubscribe, and “visit site”. These right-click menu options worked wonderfully in Firefox, and I’ll be installing an updated Java VM on my main home machine to test this out.
Additional features allow you to add a Blogroll to your blog from NewsGator Online, supply an OPML URL, add a NewsGator auto-subscribe link on your blog, add NewsGator ratings to your site, and offer API options to developers. The knowledge base was consistent and easy to use. Structured in a hierarchical format, the articles were easy to read and the system was quick. The customary FAQ was easily found and contained helpful starter how-to’s.
The one downside to the knowledge base, was that once deep within the system, there was no easy link at the top or bottom of the otherwise cleanly designed page to go back to the “reader” view. A few simply “back” clicks get me to where I wanted, but a simple “Reader” link would be better.
Performance
This online news reader was rather quick. I’ve seen faster ones (Attensa for example), but
Dislikes
I actually like this product and may keep my free account, but I did see some strange behavior when marking posts as read. When you click on the folder instead of expanding the folder, then mark the feeds as read, the folder closes. If you expand the folder, then marking fields in a feed as read does not close the folder. This makes sense, but when you click on the folder it appears to expand the folder and allow you to click on feeds, so it is a little confusing.
Summary
To finish up, I find that I like the speed, flexibility, style and ease of use of the NewsGator Online product. Here’s how I rate it (1 being low and 5 being high).
- Pros: Good performance, adequate features, easy to use, nice blog add-on options, neat custom “My Clippings” folder
- Cons: Some odd behavior in Internet Explorer (Java related), can’t set sync schedule, can’t export feed list.
UPDATE: I have to take back what I said about IE6 – at least for some installations the same full functionality will be available. After re-building my day-to-day system with a clean install of XPSP2, I find that all the AJAX functionality in Firefox is also here. Must have something messed up on my other system (sorry).
UPDATE2: While I was unable to find an export function, Jonathon McDougall from NewsGator recommends the following tip to save your OPML. Enjoy!
- Log into your account and go to My Settings | Edit Locations
- Under each location you will see an OPML link. You can choose to make the URL to your OPML public, or if you view your OPML online, you can save it to a file.
Thank you Jonathon!
UPDATE3: Check out the review of NewsGator Mobile at Arne Hess’ the::unwired!
MSNBC.com Mobile – For Windows Mobile
Interesting – MSNBC is offering a new mobile service specifically for Windows Mobile devices. It kind of surprised me that all the currently available Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone versions are listed on the site. Did I mention – its free?
To sign up, you simply select your device, enter your phone number (which is only used to send you a URL via SMS) and then download the client software (~700k). The service offeres up to the minute news, picture news, news videos, and clips of the Today show. Seems kind of neat.
Check it out here: MSNBC.com Mobile
Via: Pocket PC Thoughts
Also in a Dry Spell
Kent Newsome talks about having a dry spell in his blogging, and compares it too some similar dry spells he’s had in his song writing. It does seem like there is a lack of interesting content in the blogosphere lately, and he presents it in an interesting way.
Wish I had found this post earlier – I’m having a similar problem. Though I am trying to write a few reviews, it is still hard to find the motive to sit down and write, even when I’ve pre-selected the topic. Hopefully over the weekend, this will change a bit – relaxation always helps me.
A Clean Slate
Wow, I’ve been doing a lot of testing lately. In the past week, I’ve had 4 operating systems installed on my system for testing, investigating and learning. So now that I’ve gotten that work done, I’m re-installing my base build (again).
Instead of using the image I made late last summer, I’m going to start fresh (again), but try something completely new. During testing, I limited the amount of software that was installed, and really relied on more online functionality. That is what I’m going to do this time around.
- Office 2003? Nope.
- MSN or Google Toolbar? Nope.
- Digital Image Editor/Library? Nope.
So what will I install? Firefox, Thunderbird for EMail, Pluck for my aggregator, WinZip, SnagIt, and very little else. I’ve got most of my “heavy duty” software on my main machine and simple “remote desktop” into that PC to run what I need. Its also my main Audio/Video “server” system and hosts some Virtual systems.
My day-to-day machine will remain a simple uncluttered computing device. My inspiration for this was my T-Mobile MDA. I’ve been using my MDA for several weeks and have found that I can do with a lot less! And the best part of all?? This new configuration is FAST.
GMail on Pocket PC
Has anyone had a good GMail experience on Pocket PC? I’ve got it set up and working with the default mail client in Windows Mobile 5. Send and receive work fine, but the weird thing is that as soon as you open a message in WM5 Mail – the message disappears from the list of email.
This is not how it works with other “standard” POP3 mail accounts, why does GMail behave differently? One thing I have not done yet is to search out for a GMail PPC client. Has anyone use one? How do you work with GMail on your PPC?
On the .mobi TLD
I’ve been putting off posting on the .mobi top level domain. I’m not sure yet… I do agree with Russell Beattie on his points of why its a “good thing”. Having a standard is very useful, as Russ points out, to be able to know that you can go to yoursite.mobi and have a mobile page formated correctly for your device.
It’ll be nice if it all works - sites need to adopt this for it to really become useful, and of course, every site needs to purchase another domain. This is the part that I really have an issue with. Why not simply have your site automatically reconfigure the output based on the resolution or browser string? Guess that makes too much sense.
Investigating RSS Readers
A week ago, my manager pulls me aside and shows me a list of all the web sites that I had hit the previous month, since I was in the “Top 10” users of the ‘net that month. What makes me laugh about this is that I was not in the Top 10 for the previous few years! Also, the way our company “measures” Internet usage is inaccurate – the number of web hits in a month is meaningless – and this seems to be the only measurement they are using. What about amount of data transferred per site, or the amount of time per site?
Anyway, the gist of all this is that after explaining why my usage is “up” and why I expected it to go much higher, is from the use of RSS feeds. Once she understood what RSS was, she asked if I would present an overview at our next team meeting at the end of April. So I’m going to start reviewing low/no cost RSS readers over the next few weeks. The emphasis will be on ease of use, features, cost, performance. I’ll try to be impartial, but I’ll admit up front that I’ve been using RSS/ATOM/XML aggregators for over 2 years now and have found what works for me – though I’m always looking for something better.
So watch over the next several weeks, I’ll have some reviews up for your review!
Disappointed in FlexMail 2006
FlexMail 2006 is an email application for Pocket PC devices. WebIS had released previous versions under the name Mail, and I purchased a copy of Mail 2.0 awhile back. Since the new version was released earlier this month, I thought I’d try out the new version and see how it has grown.
Now WebIS has done some substantial work on this product for compatibility with Windows Mobile 5, to support for SSL on both inbound & outbound POP/SMTP mail accounts. Support for IMAP is here as well, though I have no IMAP accounts to try it with. Other new features are support for VGA and square screen devices, integration of SMS messaging on phone devices, and various other small though important inprovements.
My main thing I was looking forward to was manageability of my mail. Since I have 5 separate and distinct email accounts that I use and monitor, I have a need to keep the accounts separate. I was not able to do this in FlexMail. The built-in Messaging application in WM5 has the ability to have separate folder structures for each mail account – FlexMail does not. This simple difference negates all the features of FlexMail for me.
The built-in mail client for WM5 is surprisingly flexible for multiple accounts and this is what I need rather than the ability to view HTML email (though that is nice). Until FlexMail adds this kind of functionality, its getting removed from my MDA until the next version.
Wireless Broadband for Laptops
Clipmarks Service
Don’t know if I had posted about Clipmarks here yet – I know I had on my old blog. Clipmarks is a neat service that lets you “clip” a section of a web page and archive it to your account on Clipmarks. It also allows you to tag the clip with information useful to you for future reference. You can then search on that information at another time.
The service also allows you to share and save your clips by email or by directly saving a file to your computer. I mainly have been using it for research, where I can later go back and reference the information I’ve found while browsing the web. Its really easy to use, and does require a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
I hope the leadership of the Republican Party will take his word seriously. Because this is exactly right.
This is very simple: only Americans citizens should be allowed to vote in American elections.
The SAVE America Act is common sense, and we need to pass it now!
I don’t recall you complaining when gas was $5.00 under Biden.
Hypocrisy much?
Please RT!
This Middle Ages bullshit is a cancer on the planet👇👇🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸