NetNewsWire Lite
I know quite a few bloggers who use NetNewsWire, so I downloaded the freeware Lite version to give myself an introduction to the product and to see how I like using a desktop aggregator.
It’s a 3-pane aggregator, meaning a window listing subscriptions is on the left, a list of new content is in the top window, and the bottom window shows the item.
It comes with a number of preselected feeds of mostly Apple-related sites. I was able to unsubcribe to all of them by selecting them with the apple key held down and selecting Unsubscribe from the File menu.
It has a ‘drawer’ with a number of feeds organzed by topic and blog name to make subscribing easy.
Importing an OPML file took just a moment. Now I have 927 unread items from approximately 60 sources. That number will increase significantly as I subscribe to a number of feeds.
When I was subscribing to things on the Web, it took me a while to realize that once I copied the feed URL and hit Subscribe, NetNewsWire would automatically put the feed URL in the box. That’s really cool!
There’s a button at the top that says Post to Weblog. For some silly reason, I never thought about that as a feature I should look for in an aggregator. It doesn’t seem to work as I expected it to, perhaps because I don’t have the right kind of blog software. I can get it to launch BBEdit, which is what I use when I blog offline, but it doesn’t copy any text or anything like that. I was hoping it would at least do that. But a smidge is better than nothing.
It’s going to take me a while to figure out how I want to organize the feeds using their folder system. It looks like it might be possible to have the same feed in multiple locations. That happened when I imported two subscription files (one OPML, one XML) with some overlapping content. I’m not sure if I can do that manually or if that’s just an accident.
If I click on a folder, I can see a list of the unread content in the sources below the folder. I complained about not being able to do that with Pluck.
Now that I’ve subscribed to several more sources, I’m up to 1143 unread items (but I’ve read a bunch, so the number of things in the aggregator is higher than that) in maybe 60-70 sources (I’m not going to count). I’m not panicking nearly as much as I thought I would. I can tell, though, that procrastination might become problematic. I’m used to aggregators that roll content off because they only hold so many sources and posts at one time. Now, I find myself thinking, “I don’t have to read all 1143 right now. They’ll still be there later.”
I understand it’s up to me to tell NetNewsWire what read feeds to keep. Otherwise, it sheds them. I like that process better than the idea of an aggregator that keeps everything automatically. For me, it’ll be less effort for me to tell it what to keep rather than what to delete.
It took me a while to figure out that I can copy a individual post’s link by pressing control when I click. I kept thinking copying a link location would be easier or more obvious than that, like how in a Web browser holding the mouse button down or right clicking on a PC brings up that handy menu.
It’s possible to rename feeds, too, and change the color and information in the box with the posts based on pre-set themes.
Can I just say FULL IMAGE COMICS!!!!!!!
August 25th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
WHICH comics are you getting full image feeds for? (unfortunately, due to the lameness of most blogging SW, I’ll never see your response to this unless you post it seperately or mail me directly.)