Brian's Blog

I've been a user of Bloglines for quite a long while now and have thus far been fairly happy with it. Just in case you've been living in a bubble, Bloglines is a web based RSS aggregator. The primary advantage for me was that I could access it anywhere without having to install a client on the PC I was at or needing to ssh into my box here at home to load up snownews. The only thing that Bloglines has going against it is you really don't know exactly what they do with all that data and usage statistic that I speculate the gather.

What I'm leading up to is a project called FoFRedux. FofRedux is a continuation of the stagnate Feed on Feeds project. Both are web based server side RSS aggregators. FoFRedux has a very simple, yet effective interface. There are some minor annoyances that I picked up on, such as the Mark All Read option doesn't mark everything as ready. It only marks all the entries currently showing on the screen. Slightly annoying but not a show stopper by far. It requires PHP and mysql to work, which was a jump for me as I've never setup a PHP/mysql app before. Once I got over my stupid errors it was up and running in a snap and crawling through all my feeds giving me a central location to check up on news that I can access from anywhere.

I know I could just keep using Bloglines, but I've been trying to get away from relying on external services for basic things such as these. Call me a control freak but I much prefer to have as much of my data local and under my jurisdiction as I can.