I’ve been using the Sage Firefox extension to read all of my RSS feeds, and I like it a lot. The one flaw in my use of it, which is more my fault than Sage’s fault, is that I use multiple computers throughout the day. During the workday, I’m at work. When I go home, I could be on the study desktop or the living room laptop. It’s easy to copy the list of Sage feeds from computer to computer, but it’s not possible to synchronize across computers its notion of “old” and “new” news.

Today I decided sacrifice my normal aversion to web-based services and switch full-time to a web-based RSS reader. Some of the ones I didn’t like:

• The Google reader easily wins the “buzz” factor, but it isn’t very usable. It follows the “labels” motif found in their GMail product (I like hierarchical folders, dammit), and it is somewhat wasteful of screen real estate. To be fair, it is still officially “beta”, but I don’t expect the “labels” UI motif to change.
• The My Yahoo! RSS feature isn’t very full-featured. All you get is “news headlines” integration with other news sources (headlines only, annoying click-through required to read text).

After an hour or two of fiddling around with various web-based readers, I settled on Bloglines, which I discovered through some of Tsaiberspace’s readers. It has a decent interface and is easy to migrate to from Sage:

• Bloglines’ interface very closely matches that of Sage: on the left, you get a Windows Explorer-like hierarchical user-configurable tree of folders, subfolders, and RSS feeds; on the right, you get the headlines and article content. It is easy to keep up with all your RSS feeds in one screen. Bloglines remembers which articles have been read and removes them from your view as you catch up on your reading. And of course, since you log in to a web-based account, there is no problem of re-reading old news when you change computers.
• Bloglines provides an OPML import/export facility to copy your RSS feeds from Sage into your Bloglines account.
• Various tools exist to simply administration of a Bloglines account. The third-party LiveLines Firefox extension overloads the Firefox “RSS” icon to integrate your RSS feed management with a good number of RSS managers (including Bloglines and Sage). Bloglines also provides a bookmark toolbar button (for non-Firefox users).
• You get AJAX-y keyboard navigation between feeds, folders, and articles.

This wouldn’t be a real blog if I didn’t have some bad things to say:

• Initial setup isn’t as snappy as it should be. The OPML import/export facility it there, but it’s kind of buried in the UI; you’ll have to click around to find it. But initial setup only happens once, so this isn’t really a deal-breaker.
• “Old” articles are too hidden. In Sage, “old” articles are distinguished from “new” articles by being displayed in a less-intense gray-ed out font color. In Bloglines, “old” articles are simply hidden from view. Suppose that you are completely caught up on all your RSS reading (such as on a slow workday). In Sage, you will still see the last few most-recent headlines in a light-gray font. In Bloglines, you just get a “there are no new items to display”, but it’s not very reassuring; I’m left feeling that I might have missed something while bouncing around between computers. Bloglines does allow you to click your way through to see “old” articles, but it does require clicking; it’s not as immediately intuitive as simply seeing the last most recent “old” articles to reassure you that you haven’t missed anything. Since I can’t think of a better way to reassure the reader that nothing is wrong, I can’t fairly call this a deal-breaker either.