Bloglines has a huge glitch. Huge yet so basic, I’m surprised it hasn’t been reported and fixed yet. If you keep your feeds organized in folders, you’d expect to be able to click either the folder name or the little plus sign to open up the list of feeds in the folder. Yeah, right. Click the folder name, and without warning ALL your feeds change to “read” status – i.e. disappear entirely, if you – like me- normally look at unread items only. Now what am I supposed to read?
I haven’t been an active Bloglines user for a while, just keeping it as a backup and benchmark against what became my primary reader: Attensa. The very reason I looked at Bloglines today is that despite all the hoopla surrounding Attensa, I am about to quit using it. Two frustrating glitches cause me spend way to much time, when a reader is supposed to save time and make me efficient in the first place:
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Serving up the same old feeds again and again: Attensa keeps on presenting most of my feeds repeatedly as “undread” – no, they have not changed, and I verified it on Bloglines. I am either forced to fish for truy new entries or set everything to “read”, and miss some good posts. Who has time for this?
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Not dowloading images: OK, this is an Outlook security setting. But in “normal” Outlook folders I can click and set the sending domain “trusted” after which I will get the images downloaded from this particular sender. Not in the Attensa folders: I have to click every single post every single time to make them readable.
There’s more, but these are the two killers, and after countless emails over 6 weeks, Attensa support still only seems to partially understand what the problem is, let alone any plan to fix it. I lost patience, I am spending way too much time testing and educating support – I am out of here?
Any recommendations for an offline reader?
Update (7/4): Hm.. Feed Reader day, lots of posts on Earthlink’s new reader:
Tags: Attensa, Bloglines, Customer Support, Feed Reader, MS Outlook, Outlook, Software QA, Earthlink
Zoli
We are very sorry you have been having problems with Attensa for Outlook 1.2 and I assure you we take your issues seriously and want to be responsive in resolving them.
All of your issues and suggestions have been logged and addressed by our customer support and development teams. On Tuesday we released a new version of Attensa for Outlook, version 1.5, which resolves the issues you have posted here.
The image issue is related to security settings in Outlook. We are developing a long term solution to this problem for the traditional Outlook folder view. The new version gives you a choice of views for reading your news – a traditional Outlook view and a new River of News view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you subscribe to. In the River of News view images included in post will appear. This view does not rely on Outlook settings for its display parameters.
The “Unread” state is driven by feeds that include Google ads. When new Google ads are served the articles would be updated and the state would change from read to unread. This problem has been eliminated in the new version.
The beta of Attensa for Outlook is available here: http://www.attensa.com. It’s free.
We have prepared a detailed Getting Started guide that will walk you through the new features and capabilities.
You can download it here: http://www.attensa.com/products/outlook/
If I can be of any further assistance please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at scott dot niesen [at] attensa dot com
Thanks
Scott Niesen
We added a feature in the Awasu 2.2.1 beta to download linked-to feed items for reading offline (which is what I take you to mean when you say “offline reader”). This version can also be configured to download images embedded in feed items so that they can be shown when offline.