Winternet

Bloglines is hands-down the best RSS reader I’ve used. This includes desktop applications on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and web-based applications. Here are the reasons why I use it to read my favorite websites.

Synchronization
Since it’s a web-application I can use it from work, home, and on friend’s or coworker’s computers. I read an entry on the T on my Sidekick and when I get home it’s marked read in my aggregator.

Interface
HTML Frames have their uses (rarely) and this is one case where they’re used to great success. I can’t deal with aggregators who display your subscriptions as one big long crazy list. I subscribe to some high-traffic feeds and I don’t want them cluttering the screen when I’m trying to see if Joel Spolsky has posted anything new.

Bandwidth-friendly
Bloglines only grabs a feed once for all of its users thereby bearing the bandwidth burden for the sites that provide syndication.

Feature-rich
Want to know how many Bloglines subscribers a feed has? Want to know what people who read your blog also subscribe to? Want recommendations based on your current subscriptions? Bloglines has all these features and more.

Support
Less than a day turnaround for a question that I really shouldn’t have asked (it was in their help documents).

35 Exact String Matching Algorithms

Exit 13 is a comic anthology featuring a new story by one of my favorite artists, Nijo Philip. Order a copy before it sells out.

Dell has horrible customer service. I’ve called twice (both calls over an hour and ending with being disconnected) and filled out their “E-mail Customer Care” form three times (the first e-mail bounced back to me, the second time the response page timed out). The third e-mail resulted in this communication, which is so useless as to be worse than no response:

I apologize, but due to a system problem, there has been a delay
in processing the on-line orders. Until the order has been processed
we are not able to access the information.

Oh, well that clears that up. They have no idea where my order is. To them, it’s floating in the ether and may, at some point in the fourth dimension, materialize and my credit card will be charged. I’m really looking forward to that.

I was under the impression that Dell, unlike Gateway or HP, was well-run and customer-friendly. That they had managed to avoid sucking as much as most other computer companies do. Well…

They suck too. I placed an order for a 17 inch LCD Monday night with Next Day shipping. It should be on my desk right now. Instead I’m LCD-less and have been on the phone with Customer Support for almost two hours. At the end of which, I was transferred to an office that was closed. Before the rep transferred my call into oblivion, he told me: “Someone is working on this as we speak. I’ll transfer you right over so you can talk to them.”

Never in my life have I had to try so hard to give someone 400 dollars.

From now on, I do all my business through New Egg. I’ve gotten a lot of good hardware and good service from them for great prices.