Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Just downloaded and installed Lektora Beta. Lektora is a new browser-based RSS aggregator.
I have been using Bloglines for a while now, and pretty satisfied with it. The main reason i like Bloglines is the fact that it lets me read blogs on any computer i use, without the need for installing any new software. Yet, as Lektora is also a browser-based aggregator, i decided to give this a try. Here is my initial impression.

Positives:
1) This has a very nice and polished look.
2) Available for both IE and Firefox.

Negatives:
1) Lektora requires you to download a 1.7 MB software to your machine.
2) Every time i try to read the blogs, Lektora takes time aggregating the feeds. This seems to take more time that i would like. With bloglines, this is really a snap.
3) Bloglines has a really nice feature in which it shows only the updated feeds since i last read a blog. Somehow i couldn't figure out how to do a similar thing in this tool.
4) There is no way for me to selectively delete a few blogs that i have added to the tool. Its painful when you try and delete the default blogs one by one.

Overall, Lektora beta doesn't have enough to cause a switch from Bloglines. Once they iron out the initial usability issues, may be this is worth a look.

Update: As the author of Lektora commented in the comments section, Item 3 is actually the default in which Lektora is installed. And Item 4 : Deleting a set of blogs is actually possible in Lektora.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the review.

For item 3, this is the default behavior in Lektora. When you click on the newspaper button, it only shows the latest items since the last update.

For item 4, in the customize view, you can use the control key to do a multiple selection and then press "Delete" to erase everything you have selected.

Jean-Francois Nadeau, Lektora author.

Krishna said...

Jean, That was a very prompt reply. Thanks. Will post more about your tool as I continue using it.