Following on from my post about my experiences with the iPod Touch, this is the first review of a third party application. Byline by Phantom Fish (link opens in iTunes) is an RSS reader for your iPhone/iPod Touch which synchronises with Google Reader and allows you to read RSS feeds whilst offline as well as online.

As mentioned in previous posts, I fairly recently changed RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader. Although not the main reason, one contributing factor to this move was the functionality of Google Reader when accessing the mobile version on my iPod Touch.

Google has an iPhone optimised reader which allows you to read posts, star them, and write notes. You can choose to read all new posts or you can view them by the folders you set up in Google Reader. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

Google Reader iPhone interface

Although this is great, you can only read items when you are online. This is fine for most iPhone users who are pretty much always connected using 3G/EDGE. But for iPod Touch users like myself (or iPhone users who sometimes have no internet connection such as those who travel via underground), it means you can only read your feeds whilst you’ve got wireless access.

Over Christmas I found out about Byline (link opens application details in iTunes), an application which synchronises with your Google Reader account but also enables you to read your RSS feeds offline.

You can open the application whilst are connected to the internet to synchronise with your Google Reader account; Byline downloads any new feeds and archives them so that you can then read them offline. It’s great for me because I can sync at home in a morning before I go to work and can then catch up with my feeds whilst I’m travelling to work (I travel to work by public transport). In order to update your Google account you need to sync again after you have read them (I usually do this when I get to work).

Functionality is very similar to the Google site – you can star items, mark them as read/unread, write notes about them, and view new items either all together or by viewing specific folders.

The look of the application is very unusual; I quite like it but there are some negative comments on Apple’s store about Byline are due to the look of the application. It has a wooden textured look, as shown in the screenshot below:

Home page of Byline - with options to view all new items or those from one of your Google Reader folders

From the summary view of the feeds, you can see details of the title of the post, which blog it is from, when it was posted, and the first couple of lines of the post. You can also mark items as read/unread on this page by swiping across them with your finger (like you do to delete e-mails).

Another thing I like about Byline is that you can order posts so that you see the oldest first. This is not normally something I need, but it is useful when you have quite a few posts and not much time as you can just read the first few oldest posts, then synchronise later on to read the newer items either in Byline or at your PC. I tend to find this useful in a morning when I’m not sure whether or not I will get time to read all the posts. I read what I can, and then sync at the office to read the newer posts later.

The screenshot below shows the New Items screen which lumps all new feeds together. From here you can choose to read particular posts and mark others as read/unread.

New items page in Byline (those with a dot are unread)

If you’re using it and you have access to the internet (if you’re on an iPhone for example or an iPod and in a wireless area) you can also view the original post within Byline and click to follow any links in the post which will open in Byline instead of launching Safari. This is really neat as you can check out interesting points from the article taking you all over the internet, and then just click the down arrow in the Byline header when you’re done to move straight to the next item in your new items list.

You can also choose to read Byline in either portrait or landscape mode – landscape is often easier for reading longer blog posts.

View of Byline in landscape mode

There are other products that synchronise with Google Reader too, this is the only one I have tried. I decided to purchase Byline (currently £2.99) after reading the reviews on the App Store and I certainly haven’t been disappointed. It’s a nice way to read your RSS feeds even when you do have access to the internet – personally I prefer using a dedicated application to opening Safari and going to my Google Reader bookmark. Being able to also read your RSS feeds when you don’t have internet access makes it a perfect application for those with an iPhone/iPod Touch who want to catch up with their RSS feeds whilst away from an internet connection.

Has anyone else tried any good RSS readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch? Let me know in the comments if so.

Are you sometimes afraid to open your RSS reader as you know you will be met by a shockingly large amount of unread items? Up until recently, I was – I particularly noticed it when I didn’t check my RSS feeds as frequently as usual back in October when I waspreparing for my interview, finishing my Diploma, and then went to Florida for 2 weeks . When I opened it up again after the break, I had thousands of unread items and found myself flicking through most of them with little interest.

I started to look at Google Reader’s Trends to help me analyse which feeds I was actually reading and which were just clogging up my inbox. I also looked at the frequency of postings and the percentage of items in the feed I read. I had realised that a lot of my feeds were giving very similar news – I had subscribed to quite a few techy news blogs, many of which were telling me about exactly the same things. I decided to do some strict weeding and deleted any feeds which I either didn’t read regularly enough, or which gave the same (or similar) news to other feeds. To give you an idea of the sort of data you can get from Google Trends, here’s a screenshot of my trends page (before I weeded!):

The exercise was very useful and made me realise how many blogs I actually truly value reading. I enjoy reading many librarian blogs, particularly those with practical posts based on their own experiences. But I just wasn’t reading many of my “general” blogs. I have kept most of my librarian blogs (although I have deleted some which seem to have bitten the dust), but have only kept a few general techy blogs as many of the techy stuff I am interested in or need to know about is either mentioned on the key blogs I still subscribe to (such as Lifehacker) or are mentioned in my librarian blog RSS feeds.

I found Google Trends very useful for helping me weed my feeds, it’s quite interesting seeing which feeds you do actually read regularly and which you don’t, and might actually surprise you. It’s also useful to find out what time and day you tend to read your feeds, as well as trends for posting times (although I guess this is skewed due to different time zones, many of the blogs I read are American). It’s also given me an insight into the sort of blogs I do genuinely enjoy reading and made me evaluate feeds before adding them to my reader just because they have one interesting post.

For those who have a New Year’s resolution to streamline their processes, one way you might want to try doing this is to weed your RSS feeds to make sure you’re getting the most out of them, it’s certainly helped me.

When I first starting using RSS feeds a couple of years ago, I used Google Reader and had a widget on my iGoogle page which I used to read my feeds. As my collection of feeds grew and I switched to Pageflakes as a homepage, I decided to move my feeds into Bloglines. I’d heard a lot of positive things about Bloglines and I certainly wasn’t disappointed – the interface worked well and I just found that I gelled with it. I even wrote a blog post about how great it was last year.

I have been using Bloglines Beta and particularly liked the 3 pane view. The interface was easy to follow and the customisation suited me well. I spread the word about how great Bloglines was and encouraged other people to give it a go. Typically, I then found that things started to go downhill. Items weren’t being updated properly, some items I couldn’t mark read, others were being marked read before I read them, and I couldn’t find some of my saved items. Then more recently Bloglines changed the colour scheme and it became difficult to tell whether or not there were new items, I like to be able to see at a glace whether or not there are any new items. The Bloglines iPhone interface also frustrated me – the feeds were there but it had very limited functionality such as being unable to save things to read later. It’s not just me that experienced problems with Bloglines, others have been complaining about it too on Twitter and their blogs.

Around this time, I also found out about Google Reader Trends which can help you see which feeds you read and which you don’t. I have reached a point where I have too many feeds to keep up with so this was the final push which led to me switching back to Google Reader.

OPML makes it so easy to change, it was just a simple case of exporting from Bloglines and importing into Google Reader. I am so far very happy with Google Reader, I love being able to easily star items or share them with others. The iPhone interface is also far more feature rich than the Bloglines version – I am able to have a quick glance, and star items of interest to read later:

I haven’t used Google Trends to its full potential yet but it is very interesting, a quick check now tells me that I do most of my reading late at night (this is usually on my iPod in bed when I can’t sleep!) and I read most posts on a Sunday. Below is a screenshot of the sort of information you get (as you can see from the top graph my reading habits have been sporadic for the last month and I haven’t read any for a few days, RSS reading has been pushed to the bottom of my list of priorities at the moment):

I’m certainly going to try to organise my RSS feeds again and see if I can cull a few of those I don’t read anymore or which have stopped posting.

So, at the moment I’m sticking with Google Reader, although I’m going to keep an eye on developments with Bloglines and may well switch back if things improve – that’s the beauty of RSS and OPML!

How about you? Which feed reader do you use and why? I’m always up for trying new readers, particularly web ones so that I can access them from work or home.

As a regular user of RSS feeds (I currently subscribe to over 150 feeds and check them daily), I am keen to encourage others to use them.

We have started trying to encourage students to use an RSS reader to keep up-to-date via our information skills sessions and I would like to try to promote them to researchers and academic staff also. There are a number of useful academic blogs as well as news feeds and feeds for new items in journals.

I was therefore delighted to see Joe Hilton and Roddy MacLeod’s article in the latest edition of SCONUL Focus detailing their ticTOCs project.

Taken from the ticTOCs website:

The ticTOCs Project is piloting a free service where researchers, academics and anyone else can keep up-to-date with scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs)

What a great service! ticTOCs currently has 7,742 journal Tables of Contents which users can sign up to receive updates of in their ticTOCs account. Ideally I’d like to see everyone familiar with RSS feeds and using RSS readers but for those who only want to use it for journals ticTOCs is an ideally starting point. Let’s hope it raises the profile of receiving feeds to keep researchers up-to-date.

I’ve been having a play with various RSS readers since I started following blogs.

Google Reader was the first that I tried and I was also using iGoogle as my start page at the time. I found Google Reader very easy to use, particularly through my start page. The good (and bad!) thing about this was that I was checking my feeds pretty much all day, whenever I went back to my start page (which I do fairly regularly as I use it for my to do list). Although this was great for keeping really up to date and meant that I didn’t have to spend a lot of time all at once checking my feeds, I also found it disruptive as it was eating into my day (you could say I should just learn to be more disciplined and ignore it of course but I get far too easily distracted, particularly when I’m studying!).

At the same time as thinking about this, I decided to give a different start page a go – iGoogle was good but I wanted a play with PageFlakes as Phil Bradley raves about it so much in his How to use Web 2.0 in your Library book. When I set up my start page on PageFlakes I chose a few of my favourite blogs and added them to a separate page titled “Web 2.0″. I kept my to do list and links to sites relating to work on my main page which meant I only saw the blogs when I actively wanted to. I also exported my blogs from Google Reader (which was a seamless procedure thanks to their Export to OPML feature) and put them into the PageFlakes Reader. This was, quite frankly, a disaster. The PageFlakes Reader took an age to find new posts, often the posts were all over my page (i.e. not aligned for some reason) and I found that many posts, despite having read them and marked them as read numerous times, kept coming up as new posts. The option to view the blog in its original page through the reader was useful, but apart from that I found it very difficult to use.

I then decided to try something completely different, BlogLines – which specialises in RSS/blog feeds. One of the main reasons for trying it was actually related to work – it’s something one of my colleagues recommend students use to subscribe to our library blogs so I thought I should give it a go. I again exported my OPML and imported it into BlogLines. At the time I was playing around, BlogLines Beta was being tested so I decided to have a play with that too. I’ve organised my blogs more (lots of separate folders so that if I only have a bit of time I can just check the Library/Web 2.0 blogs as they are the ones I am most interested in keeping up to date with) and now only check when I have time to rather than all the time. I realise for some people this defeats the object a little (having to go and check what has been updated) but it suits me better and at least I only have to check one place. One thing I particularly like about BlogLines Beta is the 3 pane view, I can select the folder I want from the left hand pane, then scroll down the titles of the posts on the top right hand pane, and click to view those I want to in the main pane. (see the screenshot below – click for a bigger version). I can also save things to read or refer to later by pinning them which works really well. The only thing I miss from BlogLines in BlogLines Beta is the ability to see other subscribers and see what they have subscribed to – I found a few blogs by searching other people’s blogs who share my interests. I can’t work out how to do this on BlogLines Beta but I’m sure there must be a way!

So, in summary, I think Google Reader and BlogLines are both excellent for controlling your feeds, BlogLines particularly so with all its new features. Using PageFlakes as a reader I’d steer well clear of though – great start page, lousy reader.

Anyone else have any favourites or different experiences?

Bloglines are having a revamp and for those who use Bloglines you can try it out and give important feedback.

I haven’t been using Bloglines for very long but thought I would give it a go and I have to say it certainly seems more user friendly (I’m currently trying to see which feed reader might be best to recommend to our students who are new to RSS feeds) and a lot more reliable than some of the others I’ve tried.