Techhawking

If you run a blog or a website, chances are that you want to make it easier for people to bookmark you website. Here is a nice little page with list of APIs to help you generate those links for your website.

Flock has a great News Engine, but over the last few months I realized that unless someone comes out with a something equivalent of Google Sync, I don’t think its going to work for me. I have 2 laptops and a desktop to work with and find it difficult to manage and read the daily news items. I did try using the google sync firefox plugin hack to sync flock, but I couldn’t get news to sync up. I hope someone comes out with that plugin.

So after giving up on flock I turned to online news readers. The one I’ve heard a lot about was bloglines. To begin with I think there is a lot of improvements they can do with the UI. It was a serious turn off for me. Then there was the non-Ajax refresh which was another big usability bottleneck. Its hard to understand why they haven’t switched to Ajax for most of the server interactions.
May be I am dumb, or may be I got used to flock, but I couldn’t figure out how to create folders and subfolders for by blogs which I want to read. Managing 200 blogs without subfolders gets a little tough. Bloglines has a few interesting features like creating your own blogs, creating blogrolls, etc… which are nice but they are not for me.

While I did find bloglines to have solved my problem, I didn’t stop looking until I found Rojo. Rojo was easy to use, Ajax based, with support for subfolders. One feature which I still miss from Flock is the ability to mark individual items are “read” or “unread”. Again, I might be dumb, but I can’t find this feature in Rojo. But they have a way to flag a news which is very close to what I want.

BTW there were two other news readers I did think about but didn’t investigate deep enough. I didn’t like Google Reader for its complicated interface, and didn’t want to start using MyYahoo after being burnt by their Mail service sometime back.