Blog Bridge

So last week I was at work and needed to find a decent feed reader for windows. I stumbled accross BlogBridge, a multi-platform(Windows, Mac OSX, and *nix) RSS aggregator with some unique features.

The way it handles groups or ‘Guides’ is pretty nice. Instead of having an ungodly number of unread feeds displayed for each guide, it gives you the number of feeds with unread posts. Once you descend into a guide it gives you a list of the feeds, each able to have it’s own user defined rankings and tags(publishable to services such as del.icio.us) and list’s the number of item’s unread in each feed. Then you have the feed entry window, which lists all the entries for that feed(up to a user defined amount). Each feed entry can again have a star ranking and tags. There are 3 different way’s to view each feed entry. A collapsed list, a list with truncated entries, or a full list with full RSS entries.

The best feature of Blog Bridge however, is it’s syncing capabilities. You can sign up for an account at Blog Bridge, which is free, and I have gotten no spam from them yet. It allows you to sync your feeds up to thier server, go to work, sync your feeds down from the server, and not having to re-read any feeds or mark any as read. It automatically keeps track for you. This is the main reason I was switching over to a web based aggregator, I read feeds on more than one computer, and I would like them to all be in sync. I am still going to try out feedlounge, because I have used it and I love it as an aggregator.

The only problem I have come accross with Blog Bridge is that the Mac OSX version is a bit slower than the other aggregators on the platform, not to slow to use, just a bit slower than the rest. Other than that I am a big fan of the whole Blog Bridge experience and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for it. If this meets your needs, go ahead and check it out.