Frustrated by the apparent lack of nice Windows-native RSS/Atom feed readers (where’s the likes to NetNewsWire, PulpFiction and NewsFire?), I decided to give Bloglines a try.

I can’t say I’m satisfied. Bloglines works, does pretty much all it promises to do, and I’m happier with it than I was with the quirky, buggy, awkward Thunderbird solution. Judging from the amount of time it took me to figure certain things out, however, Bloglines’ interface is less than optimal.

It provides ‘notifiers‘, stand-alone clients that let you know when unread feed items have been found. That works fairly well. It also provides tighter integration, for example, using a Firefox plug-in, you can click and link or go to any page and try and subscribe to it from the contextual menu. That’s all fine and dandy. After I figured out how to patch my Thunderbird to allow for OPML export, I had most of my feeds set up, except that it ignored the hierarchy (I’m not sure whether Thunderbird’s export was hierarchical in the first place, however, so this may not be Bloglines’s fault at all). Here’s where the messy interface first struck me: I couldn’t just create a folder, and find a button to move feeds into it. I had to switch to ‘Edit’ mode first. There was no way to create a folder in there either; instead, you select existing feeds and move them to ‘New Folder…’. While clever, that’s hardly the workflow people expect.

Bloglines also prominently shows features such as ‘My Blog’ (which, for some reason, has nothing to do with this blog, whose URL I can’t specify anywhere) and ‘Clippings’, apparently some sort of pasteboard. I have used neither feature at all and don’t think I will. Finding features that do concern me, such as specifying how often it fetches new items (I was banned from slashdot.org just a few minutes after setting up my Bloglines account), or importing the OPML file in the first place, proved to me more difficult than it should have been. While the ‘Add’ page features convenient text fields for automatically fetching the right feed URLs for blogger, LiveJournal or Xanga users as well as a general ‘feed URL’ field, nothing OPML-related is mentioned here, at first leading me to believe importing wasn’t possible at all. I then found Import and Export links at the bottom of the ‘Edit’ view, which were straightforward enough.

Confusion was indeed the theme throughout using this the first few hours. I have since become acquainted enough with Bloglines, but its interface could use some serious reworking (and, most of all, rethinking).