Library clips :: August

August 22, 2006

Newshutch : the plain and easy RSS Reader

Filed under: rss, readers

I thought Alesti was a nice, clean, easy, simple web-based RSS Reader for beginners, well look no further than Newshutch.

Firstly web-based is easy, all you have to do is register and away you go, plus you can access your feeds on any computer.

But the first hitch like always is to subscribe to some feeds…this needs work, as newbies don’t know what RSS or feeds are, they don’t know how to subscribe to content, other than old school email alerts.

Anyway, besides collecting your feedset, the easy and smooth part is reading your feeds, and marking them read/unread.

Features:
- OPML import
- bookmarklet
- keyboard shortcuts
- manage feeds
- organise feeds in folders

Other:
- option to only show unread entries
- show entries from a time range…last hour, day, week, etc…
- mark a post read
- keep a post read
- mark all read
- open next feed
- mark all read and open next feed
- mark everything read (scroll down to the end of your subscriptions)
- separate scroll bars for your subscriptions and posts

I don’t think the following features are essentials for people new to reading feeds, but here are the lacking features:
- tags (feeds appearing in multiple folders)
- river of news
- bookmarking
- flagging
- then there is personalisation, but we won’t go there

I don’t care that much for bookmarking as I use a separate service, but I do like flagging posts into one folder. It kind of does this as you can keep a single item unread, but then these will blend in with the new batch of new items. Plus they are distributed, a flagged folder will have all your purposefully unread items in the one spot…personally I’d like both features.

Also, river of news is an essential for me (folder or whole level)…anyway if it had these two features I’d seriously consider using this over of the current more powerful RSS Reader I use, sometimes you just have to go back to simplicity…my feed set is getting smaller these days, so simple is OK.

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Performancing exchange : a blog as the new bulletin board

Filed under: blogs

Performancing Exchange is a communal blog where you can add posts for your web 2.0 service requirements such as:
- Blogging Jobs
- Blogs for sale
- Services wanted

I see some impressive offers by well known web 2.0 services, this exchange is taking off…what I like about it, is that it is a free (for now) interactive job board.

NOTE: they have used the blog format instead of the traditional bulletin board…a blog seems ideal for this type of content, it is time sensitive, clear, has comments (rather than a forum which kind of expects discussion), has voting, and will be indexed by search engines, and you can dress up the blog and use it as a hub to other services.

More:
CrunchBoard
37 Signal Job Board
Blogger Jobs
Blogger Jobs Biz
Blog Network Watch