I’ve used Sage as my primary RSS reader for a couple years now. It has a couple things that annoy me, but on the whole it’s worked well for me.
I tried a couple web based readers, but they all had issues I didn’t like, like not being able to sort feeds etc. A while back (a year? 2?) Google released a web based reader called.. Reader. I didn’t like that at the time either, but the other day Joel mentioned that he uses it, so I thought I’d check it out.
One of the first things I noticed was that there was an option to use the “old” Google Reader. It appears there’s been an almost complete re-write since I used it last.
It was able to import all my feeds via OPML, and wonder of wonders, it kept all my categories! It also put a copy of all my feeds into a category of its own, but was able to delete that category easily enough. That pretty much clinched it for me, and I’ve been using Reader now for about 2 weeks. I think I’m going to stay.
There are a couple things I don’t like of course. It’s VERY easy to mark an item as “read”, but I can’t find any way to mark it unread. Also, I don’t like Google watching everything I do, so if I log in with my regular browser, they Know All. Fortunately, I have a lot of browsers available, so I run it in Galeon.
To mark it unread click the checkbox beside “Read” at the bottom of each feed. If will uncheck the box and you’ll be good to go. I’m trying to mark things with a star if I want to go back and read them again (more carefully) instead of unread because that is a bit easy to mark read again and loose them.
Funny, I just went all Google Reader myself. It’s remarkably like NetNewsWire in UI, including the “just hit space” factor.
I haven’t found anything that works as well for me as Opera’s built in reader.
Fast, easy, simple, built into the world’s best browser!
(posting with Opera)
I just tried Opera’s reader, and for light reading it seems nice. Is has the same problems as all client side readers, it doesn’t remember what you’ve read across machines, and it doesn’t really have any organization of the feeds. I have about 75 feeds I read, it would get quite long in that menu. 🙂