Sage

RSS aggregators are everywhere, and I’ve used most of them. Eventually I settled on Feeddemon by the always excellent Nick Bradbury. It’s a great piece of software written by a guy who honestly cares about making great tools. But I stopped using it. Why, because as great as it is, it’s just another something I have to launch. That means I have to remember I want to read my feeds, then launch yet another app on my already cluttered desktop. It’s a small thing, but it’s big enough to stop me from doing it.

A few folks recommended Bloglines. This worked for me because it was in my browser, which is always running. It’s always right there so it gets used, never mind the fact that it’s a clunky web interface that nowhere near matched FeedDemon’s GUI. Strange how that works.  Eventually after adding a hundred or so feeds, that web interface just couldn’t hold up so I went looking again. That’s when I found Sage. It’s a Firefox extension that uses the bookmark manager to organize your feeds. This gives me both the easy and familiar user interface – bookmarks, along with the immediate and constant availability of a browser-based system. It’s a bit buggy yet, but it’s already my default aggregator. Once again, simple and convenient trumps fancy and complex. At least for now.