ANN: FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1a with NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) Integration

Yesterday's big news was FeedDemon's integration with Bloglines. Today's big news is that FeedDemon now offers integration with NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) as well.

Some FeedDemon users may recognize NewsGator as the company that makes an RSS plugin for Microsoft Outlook which is often considered a competitor to FeedDemon, but it's perhaps not as well known that they've branched out into web-based syndication services.

Here's how to use FeedDemon's NGOS integration:

• Select File > New > New Channel Group (Shift+Ctrl+N)
• Choose "Create a new channel group for my NewsGator subscriptions" then click Next
• Enter a title for your NewsGator channel group, then click Next
• Click Finish to close the "New Channel Group" wizard

After creating your new channel group, FeedDemon will display the "Add NewsGator Channel" wizard, which shows a list of feeds in your NGOS subscriptions and enables adding them to FeedDemon.

As you can see, the NGOS integration works exactly the same as the integration with Bloglines, due in large part to the fact that they use a similar (pseudo) RESTful method of feed synching. I'm glad that after approaching me with different APIs, both Bloglines and NGOS ended up using the method I suggested instead.

I plan to write more about this later, but for now I'd like to recommend that other web services that want RSS readers to integrate with them offer a similar approach. Expecting every RSS reader to implement a different API (or SOAP interface) for each service is unreasonable when every RSS reader already supports simple HTTP GET. If you want widespread adoption, make it easy for us to adopt you.

Anyway, enough about that: stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to download FeedDemon 1.5 beta 1a. The release notes have been updated to reflect the changes in this build.

Comments

[Eadwine Rose]

I must say that I like it very much that we can help test the betas, and see the functionality of FeedDemon progress in each release.

I love betas (got Mozilla 1.8a4 here already), for that simple fact.

Thank you Nick for allowing us to share in the development :)

[Woody]

I would love to hear how the syncing actually works. In my quick testing it seems to me that all it does is download those posts to my local FeeDeemon copy and mark them read on the online service (Blogines in this case). This is not syncing in my opinion. What happens if I don’t read a post that was downloaded at that moment in that local copy of FeeDemon? I then go home to my desktop machine. I want to read those unread posts at home, but I can’t because they were downloaded at work, but not read at work.

A web-based version still works best for me.

[Judi Sohn]

I'm with Woody, here. I *love* the concept and I was thrilled to download the beta and give it a try. FeedDemon is my favorite stand-alone reader but I gave it up because I have 2 Macs, 1 PC and a PocketPC device and having all my feeds only accessible on one machine doesn't work for me.

However, unless there's true syncing where unread feeds are remembered from one device to the next this is no different than my exporting an OMPL file from NGOS or any other reader and importing it into FeedDemon.

So now I no choice but to read all my unread feeds in FeedDemon (and there are a lot) before going back to the web.

[pb]

I had trouble with the synching as well. If it works, I'd like for all of my feeds to synch, not just one specific group. I guess it ends up being like POP or (preferably) IMAP for email.

Also, I'm a REST fan and was even taken aback at how simple the BlogLines API is. The pipe-delimited response seems too unstructured. I'd like to see REST adopt more formally XML and querystring formatting for both request and response.