It is fair to say that I’m an early adopter on some things. When it comes to technology, ‘some’ becomes most. You won’t find me camping out at the Apple Store waiting for The Next Big Thing! or buying the latest and greatest computer or phone but in terms of free software — I’m on the bleeding edge.
Back in 2002 I made syndicated news reading part of a daily ritual. Using what are known as feeds, websites can provide new content in a specialized file that programs or other websites can gather, parse, compare, and determine what is new on any particular websites. The benefit is that, instead of going to hundreds of websites that I like and trying to determine what I’ve already read and what is new, I can use a program or website that shows only the new content and lets me focus on it. The best program (okay, it was one of the only programs doing this) back then was called NetNewsWire, developed by a guy named Brent Simmons over at ranchero.com.
I found Brent’s website back then because I was interested in the Perl programming language and was actually creating my own feed-reader website. And really that’s what NetNewsWire was missing — the ability to sync the feeds across multiple computers — something a web-based reader could do systemically. Speeding up the story, after a year or two of rolling my own I found Bloglines, which did a better job than what I could muster. I switched over and spent many years there until last year when Bloglines planned to shut down. And then didn’t. But by that time I had switched to Google Reader, which I’d kept current with my feeds since it started back in 2005.
If you’ve used Google Reader, though, you might feel that it is lacking (like I do). I really just couldn’t get comfortable with it. Don’t ask me why. There are many people that it works great for but it just didn’t click. So I was pleased that, when I went searching for my old standby NetNewsWire, that after Brent had sold out, NetNewswire had become ad-supported (aka free) and the software would keep my Google Reader subscription list synced between devices. It may all sound silly, but I spend a lot of time keeping up on news and websites and, consequently, this matters to me.
So now I can use NetNewsWire at the office, on my work laptop, on our home laptop, on our home desktop, or on the iPod Touch and I never have to read old news. For efficiency’s sake this is a great combination.