Newsgator RSS Aggregator
I have been wanting to write this article for a while now, but really haven’t gotten the chance to do so until now.
I have been using a program called Sharpreader for about a year now, but recently I reloaded the software on my computer to help with some slowdowns. Apparently something installed incorrectly when it came to the .NET Framework on my PC which Sharpreader uses. So I had to find another way of getting my news from all of the sites that I keep up with.
So, the first place I went to look and see what was out there was TechCrunch. That site is the best for keeping up with the Web 2.0 applications and sites. So I checked out his post about the State of Online Feed Readers and found it helpful in finding sites that offer what I want in a feed reader. I road tested all of the different ones that he reviewed because I wanted to check and make sure for myself that he was correct in his assessment of the sites. And actually, I found that he wasn’t. I tried out all of the different sites and found that Newsgator really offered what I wanted. It is easy to use and aggregates well. It also allows you to save articles for reading later. I absolutely love it.
I thought that I would put up a picture of it, just so you can see exactly what the site looks like.
So, you have this great feed reader with some absolutely stellar options. You can see that you can take your feeds and put them into categories or leave them uncategorized. Then you can also see which ones have new posts that you have not read yet. You can email stories to friends, and keep stories for use later. It is really a good system. One feature that is really neat is that there are also other applications that they make that integrate with your account, like the one for Microsoft Windows Media Center 2005 that allows you to read your articles on your TV screen using the remote. It works really well, all you have to do is sign in and you are off and running. And another great thing that Sharpreader didn’t have the capability of doing was letting you use thier service from any computer. This is extremely helpful if you want to read your sites from work or school or home. I use Newsgator everywhere now.
Now, I know what the next question is, "How do you use this though? I don’t know what RSS is."
And I can take care of that. I have a bunch of links to refer you to that tell you all about how to use RSS easily.
Paul Stamatiou has a tutorial on how to use RSS feeds.
And then Lifehacker, which is where I found Paul’s site, has thier RSS feeds in one post.
Cnet has a nice tutorial on how to use it.
And Lockergnome also has a good tutorial.
So we’ve got all these links to go through so that if you don’t understand something on one, you can check out another one. I love RSS because it keeps me from having to go to a site multiple times to see if anything new has been added, but instead I have to go to one site and it tells me everything new at all of the sites that I check. It is a wonderful invention.