September 2, 2013

In an earlier post I wrote down some thoughts about RSS services I was trying at that time. There was no real conclusion other than things are still changing. In the end (and somewhat to my surprise) I settled on using Feed Wrangler and the table below goes some way to explaining why.

Table as image blame scriptogram

Notes

  1. I’m in an unfortunate position that I have to use Internet Explorer 8 at work. As a result lots of sites including NewsBlur and Feedbin just don’t work properly. Even though Fever° works perfectly well on IE8 the domain that use to self-host is blocked by our IT department.

  2. There are iOS apps for all these services and I use Feed Wrangler on the iPhone and Mr Reader on iPad. Support for Feed Wrangler’s smart streams is limited but works perfectly well in their own app.

  3. All of these services provide access to ‘sharing’ services such as Pinboard, Instapaper and Facebook through various means. Feedbin isn’t particularly user-friendly us users need to “craft a URL” to create sharing services. Feed Wrangler only has access to Instapaper, Pocket or Pinboard, but only one of these at any time! (more on this below)

  4. Just as an aside, I consider Sunstroke the ne plus ultra of iPhone RSS apps.

  5. Feed Wrangler supports three built-in sharing services Instapaper, Pocket or Pinboard but only one of these can be the active ‘Read Later service’. This seems a strange design decision as, while I think of Instapaper and Pocket as similar services, the way I use Pinboard is different from the other two.

  6. I found NewsBlur was less widely supported perhaps due to the way it is designed for apps that behave like websites. And why should I need 3 dialogs to send an article to Instapaper‽

Software


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