So far I think they all suck.
What am I talking about? RSS Aggrigators. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between RSS Bandit, Google Reader, Outlook 2007, and several others for the last few months and none of them make me happy. A critical requirement for me is to be able to access my feedlist, with updated read counts, from any of 3 or 4 computers.
RSS Bandit allows uploading and downloading the feedlist to a WebDAV server, and I set that up. It works pretty well, but I have to remember to manually invoke the upload/download action. The UI in RSS Bandit is pretty good, but a bit clunky.
Outlook 2007 works well across computers because the feeds are stored in my Exchange profile. But it’s pretty much half-baked as an RSS reader.
Google Reader is a product of the evil enemy :-). But as of right now it is my reader of choice. The feature that sealed the deal for me is the shared items feed. I am encountering tons of articles on Windows Home Server and I want to share them with others. You can subscribe to my shared items feed (also called a link blog) here.
RSS - Posts
It’s even worse. Once you start using Google Reader, you find that you really need Firefox to set up feeds and such since subscriptions to Google Reader don’t happen from IE directly. With experimenting, I also found that neither IE7 or Outlook 2007 can see the embedded videos in Live Spaces’ blogs. Googe Reader sees them just fine. Go figure!
Now, all we need is a way to save the feed list and read state to WHS so that this all just follows us around. Kind of like roaming profiles on a domain login.
FeedDemon + Newsgator subscription does the job for me – FeedDemon synchronises against your feedlist on NewsGator, you can use NewsGator Online or (if you have a Mac, like I do) NetNewsWire on OS X, which does much the same job as FeedDemon.
I use my NewsGator subscriptions on 3 computers, anyway!
Have you looked at Bloglines yet?
I second the FeedDemon + NewsGator combo. It gives everything you asked for and then more. FeedDemon as a desktop apps gives you things that no online reader can while NewsGator gives you the freedom to check your feeds from anywhere while keeping items in sync. I’ve tried them all and FeedDemon + NewsGator is still hands down the best.