REVIEW: I'm a convert to NewsGator

For a long while, I resisted the notion of paying for an RSS aggregator, but I just broke down and plunked down $29 for NewsGator. Up until fairly recently, I had resisted even trying NewsGator, being fairly happy with SharpReader (which I still consider to be an excellent tool, especially given that it's free). But then I started having problems with entire feeds' worth of posts disappearing suddenly, meaning I could no longer search for information in them...one of the reasons that I used an aggregator in the first place. So I decided to give NewsGator a try.

At first, I wasn't all that terribly impressed, particularly when I noticed that if I had more than one level of folders, I couldn't tell which folders had new posts without expanding the tree to the bottom folder level (this is an Outlook issue, rather than a NewsGator issue, but it affects NewsGator's usability). Then I realized that with NewsGator, I could take advantage of the improved sorting and grouping features in Outlook 2003 to bring some sanity to massive feeds like the weblogs.asp.net main feed. And finally, I took a look at the main NewsGator page (which is displayed when you select the root NewsGator folder), which I'd been mostly ignoring. From this single page, you can see the most recent posts, all unread posts, and most importantly, you can delete, mark as read, post a blog entry about, or go to the folder of, any of these posts. This is incredibly handy, since it means I don't have to troll the entire folder hierarchy to figure out where the new posts are. Worth the $29 license fee for that alone.

And if, like me, you keep all posts from things like weblogs.asp.net so that you can find information in them later, you can search using the Outlook search engine. SharpReader, by contrast, had a nice Filter feature that supported filtering posts by keyword, but a full search engine is good bit more useful.

So, yes, yet again, I'm sounding like a commercial, but so be it. For the record, I do have a few gripes with NewsGator. One is that when I'm away from my computer long enough for NewsGator to poll the subscribed feeds, a Taskbar button ends up getting left active even after the dialog has gone away. If I restore Outlook and run the "Get News Now" command, the Taskbar button goes away. Not a big deal, but annoying. Another small gripe is that the blogging plug-in for posting from NewsGator to .Text does not support categories, which makes it mostly useless to me. Lastly, I did have one occasion in which NewsGator seemed to choke while getting new posts, and in the process it hung Outlook completely. Killing off the Outlook process and restarting did not help, nor was I able to get the problem resolved without rebooting, which is a pretty big deal. Fortunately, I've only run into that problem once, but it's something to consider if you are averse to running anything that might require you to reboot your machine.

UPDATE: While the .TEXT blogging plug-in available from the NewsGator site does not support categories, this one, from blogger James Geurts, does. Unfortunately, it does not yet support pulling the categories from the blog, so you have to type them in manually, separated by semi-colons (you might be able to add them in the Outlook interface, but I haven't tested that yet). It also supports posting to multiple blogs (you can choose the blogs to post to at posting time). With the addition of this plug-in, this might be my last post from w.bloggar. w.bloggar is another great free tool, but it's a pain to have to use a separate app for posting to my blog.

12 Comments

  • Matt...Thanks for the tip.

  • Matt,



    I'd love to try this, but for me at least, unzipping the w.bloggar plug-in to the NewsGator plugins directory isn't making it show up in the list of available plug-ins. Am I missing a step or two in getting it set up?



  • I would have fully expected this to work. However, Ill forward this on to Greg to see if there's something in NewsGator that is causing this.

  • Sorry to lose you as a SharpReader user, but I'm glad NewsGator is working well for you...



    Like Matt was saying, the w.Bloggar plugin I wrote should work in NewsGator as well, just like all NewsGator plugins should in theory work in SharpReader (though NewsGator's plugins tend to be installers instead of simple zip-files, so one would have to "install" them and then copy the files to SharpReader's plugins directory)



    If you want I can email you the source-code for my w.Bloggar plugin in case you feel like hacking it to figure out why it doesn't currently work with NewsGator...

  • "Sorry to lose you as a SharpReader user, but I'm glad NewsGator is working well for you..."



    Well, I had a fun time with SharpReader while it lasted, and as I said, I still think it's a great tool. I just found that NewsGator allowed me to be more efficient with my blog reading, and considering the number of blogs I read (nowhere near as many as Scoble, but still a lot), every little bit helps.



  • The only thing that I'm coming up with is that it is because the w.bloggar plugin was compiled against the 1.0 framework.



    I only have the 1.1 framework here, and the plugin does not even work within SharpReader, much less NewsGator. However, when I sent the plugin to Greg, it works fine on his machine (he has both 1.0 and 1.1 installed).



    Perhaps having the source code would not be bad, so that it could be recompiled to figure out why it doesnt work.

  • Well, Luke sent me the code, and I just recompiled under v1.1, and it's still not working for me. That could, however be because I didn't set things up correctly in Visual Studio, given that I've never looked at the blog plug-in code before tonight.



    I'll keep playing with it and see if I have any luck.

  • I figured it out. The problem (for me, at least) was that I was missing the w.bloggar registry key "InstallPath", so the plug-in was not loading correctly. Once I added the registry key and restarted Outlook, I was able to load up the plug-in.



    Both the original plug-in downloaded from SharpReader.net and the version I compiled from Luke's source worked fine once the registry key was there, so I don't think it's a v1 vs. v1.1 issue, at least not for me.



    The only downside I see to this plug-in is that because I have two separate blogs configured in w.bloggar, I have to remember to manually switch accounts to the correct blog before posting. Still, it never hurts to have more options. :-)

  • Ahh... That would make sense since the "InstallPath" key is a static variable. Therefore, it gets accessed when the instance is created.



    Perhaps Luke could modify the plugin to throw some sort of exception when this happens, so that others can figure out whats going on too.

  • Somebody else mentioned this tip and I love it. Since NewsGator is Outlook based, if you have Outlook 2003 there's a very powerful feature...Search Folders. Right click on the Search Folder under NewsGator (in tree view) and create a new search folder. It already has a filter for all unread mail and it's way faster than the NewsGator main page at the top. Plus, you can organize that view by date, by author, etc. Then for more fun, create search folders for marked messages (that you've previously flagged), and for specific keywords like Longhorn or WinFS or Avalon. This is a very powerful, productive feature of Outlook that brings NewsGator way above the other readers I've tried.

  • JohnW, that's a great tip! Thanks for sharing. I didn't even realize that you could create custom search folders in Outlook 2003. Neat!

  • Jim G. :



    Not sure I understand how this is supposed to work...does it grab the categories when you create the post, or when you attempt to post it?

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