Milkduds

Online RSS Aggregators

January 28th, 2005

I had recently been interested in getting more traffic to my blog since I have been putting more posts in at regular interval. Obviously, I would like some sort of return on my investment or some feedback so that it doesn’t seem completely pointless. So, I started looking at how to add my blog to blog directories or online RSS aggregators. At first, I figured I would never use an online aggregator if I could have one installed at work and home that would alert me whenever a new post came up on a feed. But, I visited a site called Kinja which is starting to make me think that I may want to supplement my Windows aggregator.

I started out by exporting my RSS Bandit feed list to an OPML file and tried importing it into my Kinja account by doing an upload, but it didn’t take. The only other option was to point it to a url of an OPML file. So, I tried importing the file into my Bloglines account and it worked. There was a little organization that had to be done, but after that, I made my Bloglines feed public so I could get a url for my OPML file. I copied it and pasted it into the field to import it into Kinja and it worked. Then, I went ahead and imported that OPML url into my Blogrolling account and my Feedster account with not problems.

Kinja was by far the best looking of them all, and they even give you a list of Editor’s Feeds like Showcase, Technology, News, Politics, Music, etc. that are handpicked feeds for those subjects. The Showcase feed is their “best of the web”, I guess. But the only problem with Kinja is that it only shows you the latest posts from your feeds and doesn’t mark if you read them or not. Bloglines handles this feature very well and makes the feeds pretty easy to read, but doesn’t look near as good as Kinja. Feedster just doesn’t look very good and I keep having problems with bugs on the site, so I think I’ll stay away until they do an overhaul. I also tried the web edition of NewsGator, but couldn’t get the OPML to import. If I get it to work and if it impresses me, I’ll post it.

My friend, Trey, just sent me a link to Lektora, which is an aggregator you use in your browser. The nice thing is that it supports IE and Firefox, but it only works on Windows. It looks really good, so I’ll probably try it out, but that’s a whole different review that should include others like Pluck.

Entry Filed under: Technology