RSS :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

There was some good news during the week from NewsGator. As of now, their FeedDemon 2.6 for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac are free.

NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile is also free now, as is NewsGator Inbox (public beta).

Mark Hendrickson’s post at TechCrunch and others reported and commented on the NewsGator announcement.

As I’m not a Mac user, I can’t comment on NetNewsWire, but Tim Bray at ongoing is obviously a fan:

If you’ve got a job where you need to soak up a big news-flow without wasting much time, and you’re on a Mac, you really ought to give NNW a try.

FeedDemon

For me as a PC user, it was the FeedDemon part of the announcement that was of most immediate interest.

I included FeedDemon in a short series on favorite newsfeed readers, which I did last year when I was authoring Business and Blogging. At that stage FeedDemon cost $29.95 and that was in my opinion a bargain. Free is even better.

Like NetNewsWire (and like Inbox), FeedDemon is a desktop reader, residing on the user’s computer. Many prefer an online reader. I feel there is something to be said for both. The beauty of these NewsGator products is that they synchronize with NewsGator Online, which is in itself an excellent product that I’ve used for ages, and which has always been free. So you get the best of both worlds, an offline reader synchronized with an online one. NewsGator also has an iPhone interface.

For quite a while now I’ve been using BlogBridge as my primary feed reader. BlogBridge is more of an information gathering and information management tool than just a feed reader, although it does feed reading extremely well too. I posted about BlogBridge last year in the Business and Blogging series on favorite readers, mentioned above.

My New Reader Setup

I will keep using BlogBridge.

I’ve decided to also use FeedDemon plus NewsGator, but for a more select group of feeds in a couple of specific areas of business interest. Up till today, there has been quite a lot of duplication between my BlogBridge and NewsGator subscriptions, as well as a lot of old and now less relevant ones, in my NewsGator account and I did not want to spend a lot of time in a detailed cull. I’ve now exported in OPML format the feed subscriptions from my NewsGator Online account and saved the OPML file on my computer, then unsubscribed from all those subscriptions in NewsGator. As I say, most of those subscriptions – the ones I currently read, at least – are also on my BlogBridge reader. So with BlogBridge and the saved OPML file I haven’t lost anything.

In other words, I’m re-starting with a clean slate on NewsGator: as a corollary, FeedDemon which I’ve just installed will also have a clean slate, pending my adding fresh subscriptions.

Google Reader? I know, it’s very good. Just not for me as a key productivity tool. Not yet anyway.

If you are on a few “blog guru” mailing lists you will have seen promotions for courses on how to use your blog to create a book.

Today I used that thinking to save myself some unnecessary extra work and help me meet a deadline. Not that I created a book out of a blog. Rather, I was able to update a whole section of a book, without having to re-research the content and re-write the whole section.

The book is my 7 Step Business Blog. The section in question was about feed (RSS) readers.

I’d been vacillating about doing an update or new edition of the book. It was about a year in the making, off and on, and was originally published a couple of years ago. So much has changed, I was thinking that maybe I should re-cast the book completely and had even started to work on a new framework. But that had started to look like a whole new book and I did not believe I could fit that in before my imminent trip to China and then shortly after to the USA.