Nathan's Occasional Blog

Talking about RSS aggregators — which one do you like the best?:

Onfolio recently released its Onfolio 2.0 Release Candidate. For new news aggregator users, this is my second recommendation after Bloglines. Bloglines is easier, but Onfolio is much more powerful and, because it stores everything on your hard drive, opens up new scenarios (like you can read and search your feeds even when on a plane unconnected from the Internet).
[continues @ Scobelizer]

Hey Scobel, the answer to your question is complicated: I’ve been using RSS Bandit for quite some time and love it … but after your post I decided to try Onfolio 2.0 RC. So far I’m pretty impressed. I’ve been struggling with the idea that I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to post to my MSN Space has long been aggravating – they don’t currently support an API to allow external publishing. I started looking at Blogger the other night and found I can use Blogger to manage a blog on my own server (which I already have). What you’re reading is the result. But here’s where the really cool part comes in … with Onfolio I can now reply to an RSS feed item right from my aggregator!

Now I hear the argument, “But you can do that from RSS Bandit too.” Quite true, and I’ve tested that using W.Bloggar (great tool – writing in that now). But here’s where Onfolio beats RSS Bandit for me … I can read articles in a “newspaper” view and still have access to item-specific action buttons (file, flag, email, blog, etc.). In RSS Bandit I can only do those things if I right-click on the article in the feed’s posting list – it’s simply more cumbersome. Another plus for Onfolio is that if I choose to email an article to someone it actually includes the whole article, not just a URL link.

The bad about Onfolio? Obviously I’ll have to transfer all my feeds over, but beyond that it doesn’t seem to want to allow me to use W.Bloggar as my blog post tool – it opens an empty window. It worked twice right when I set it up, and then no more. 😦 Work around for me is to use the Blogger interface to start the reply, save it as a draft, and then use W.Bloggar to grab that post and edit it.

PS – W.Bloggar’s web site was hacked a few days ago and is currently unavailable. Bummer! If you Google for “wbloggar download” though you can find the installer.