Tuesday, December 26, 2006

google reader

From a suggestion on my previous blog entry I decided to test out google reader.

The first problem was that it caused Konqueror to SEGV in etch, I filed a bug report and switched to Firefox.

Next to add my feeds I had to either export them in OPML format or add them one at a time, there is no support for pasting in a list of URLs. If I was writing a RSS syndication program I would also make it parse the config files of some of the common programs, parsing a Planet config file is pretty easy.

I added a feed for a friend who's server seems to be down. While doing so I tried to add another feed, the google reader accepted the command to add the second feed but didn't actually do so - it was fortunate that I was pasting it in not typing it...

The killer issue is that it seems to be impossible to merge feeds. I want to read both Planet Linux Australia and Planet Debian, there are some people who are on both planets (EG me). So it makes no sense to do anything other than display both of them in the same view.

At this time it seems that google reader is unsuitable for my use. However it is a fairly slick system and I imagine that it would work quite well for people who have different needs to me. If you want to read the blogs of a few friends then it probably works really well. It just seems not to work well for a set of meshed communities (Debian developers and Linux users in Australia for example).


Please let me know if I somehow missed some configuration options to make google reader do what I want.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I havnt tried out these aggregators but just as a suggestion you might try out the ones on the bottom of wikipedias article on google reader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_reader

HTH

OJS

Kamaraju Kusumanchi said...

I dont think your backtrace http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=404569 is of much help. The ?? in the backtrace signify that some of the -dbg packages are not installed. I am not very sure. But anyway, I added backtrace of my crash to that bug report. hope that helps.

raju

Anonymous said...

All that should be needed to merge two planets is that both use the original guids for posts from the "upstream" blogs in their rss feeds (at least planet debian currently does this), and a feed reader that handles guids correctly and only posts each once, even if it sees multiple copies of it.

I know that this will work with ikiwiki's aggregator. Don't know about other software.

Anonymous said...

Putting multiple feeds into a folder in Google Reader will display them all in the same view. I don't think it'll take care of duplicates though.