Two ways to subscribe to feeds in SharpReader

Yeah, I made fun of people for not being able to figure out how SharpReader works when it first came out, but then sometimes I discover that I’m overlooking the best and simplest way to do things.

Check Tools – Options – General to be sure that “Listen for subscriptions on port 5335” is checked (and be sure not to try running other aggregators that also want to listen on port 5335 at the same time). That’s intended to catch clicks on the “Subscribe in Radio” icons that Radio blogs (and some others) have, but there’s a lot more you can do with it. I’ve been using a homegrown bookmarklet that grabs the URL of the current page and passes it off as a 127.0.0.1:5335 subscription request, so I could just click the link to the RSS file, maybe be sure there’s enough content in the description to be worth subscribing, and then click the bookmarklet to pass the URL to SharpReader. Paul Victor Novarese’s comment reminded me of Mark’s autodiscovery subscribe bookmarklet, intended for Radio, which works a treat in SharpReader as well: from the weblog HTML page, just click Subscribe, and if there’s an autodiscoverable RSS feed it gets passed off to SharpReader. I should have spotted that in the changelog for SharpReader 0.9.0.2, but I somehow missed it.

The other way I’ve been subscribing is by dragging a link to the feed into SharpReader’s address bar, waiting for the feed to load, and then clicking Subscribe in SharpReader (sometimes several times, with some thrashing around, since there’s a hard to pin down bug that causes it to sometimes not subscribe when you tell it to). The other day, by accident, I dropped a link I was dragging into the lefthand pane, where the feeds you’ve subscribed to are listed. Bam! I’m subscribed, just by dropping it. Sweet.

And on the subject of SharpReader: the new stuff in version 0.9.2 all rocks. Support for <slash:comments>, so the comment counts I’ve been putting in my feed since last fall finally do someone besides users of the virtually unGoogleable, unlinkable RSS Bandit some good, lovely Feedster integration (type something in the Search box up at the top, it loads an RSS feed of the Feedster results, if you like the looks of it you can subscribe to the search feed by clicking Subscribe, and because SharpReader now supports <source>, if you really like the sound of a post in the results feed, you can just drag the orange XML icon to the address bar to see what else is in the feed, or to your subscriptions pane to subscribe right away), right click a feed or a post, and there’s an option to open Technorati‘s Link Cosmos for it. I’m with Chris Sells: Luke hit it out of the park on his first try, and again with 0.9.0.1, and 0.9.0.2, and 0.9.1 and again with 0.9.2. It’s getting to the point where it’s going to be hellishly hard to persuade me to even give competitors a decent trial, much less get me to switch.

3 Comments

Comment by Roger Benningfield #
2003-07-09 02:54:08

Phil: ”It’s getting to the point where it’s going to be hellishly hard to persuade me to even give competitors a decent trial, much less get me to switch.”

I’m that way with Newzcrawler. It could use a few things… exporting OPML, comments support, a couple bugfixes… but it’s so polished and fundamentally sound that I start to itch every time I use anything else. The only thing that keeps me playing with the alternatives is the languid pace of Newzcrawler development. I see gee-whiz stuff getting added to something like Sharpreader, and I can’t help but install and give it another try. But I always come home to NC at the end of the day. :)

 
Comment by Paul #
2003-07-09 08:38:52

The feedster integration works both ways because of the Radio Useland button (amongst others) of every result returned by Feedster. Clicking on that automatically loads it into SharpReader.

 
Comment by Derek Scruggs #
2003-07-09 08:50:20

The problem with the listen-on-localhost technique (unless I’m wrong, in which case let me know) is that it requires SharpReaders, Radio, Amphetadesk etc to be running when you subscribe. Why can’t it be as easy as signing up for an email newsletter, or even clicking on a link in an email message? Using the media player example – a lot of them try to load at startup by default, but even if you disable that ”feature,” they still load when you click on an mpeg file. Why make RSS any more complicated than that?

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <del datetime="" cite=""> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <i> <ins datetime="" cite=""> <kbd> <li> <ol> <p> <pre> <q cite=""> <samp> <strong> <sub> <sup> <ul> in your comment.