Firefox Extension: Pluck
Having gotten heartily sick of Bloglines acting up — failing to notify me of new posts for as much as 48 hours, or notifying me of the exact same damned post repeatedly until I’m ready to scream or throw the monitor out the window — I am now experimenting with the Firefox extension Pluck. It’s an RSS reader that integrates with your bookmarks sidebar, and though I’ve only been playing with it for maybe ten minutes, it seems to hold promise.
Good Things:
* Because the feeds are held in sidebar folders the same way bookmarks are, you can browse through all your subscriptions, even those without new posts. Plus, their folder-creation function is so much more obvious than Bloglines’: it was quite a while before I figured out that you could even sort things into folders on BL. (Embarrassing, but true.)
* The interface is pretty simple, yet not clunky. It feels more like an integral part of the browser that’s just been toggled on, rather than something I downloaded and installed.
* It was rather easy to figure out how to add my own feed rather than their prefab ones — despite the not-exactly-helpful introductory instructions.
* There’s an unobjectionable little icon that resides in the lower right corner of Firefox, telling you when you have unread feeds. When RSS feeds are available for the page you’re viewing, there’s another icon right next to it, allowing you very-few-clicks-necessary subscription.
Bad Things:
* You have to sign up for an account. It’s free, but you have to give them your e-mail address, and it’s not clear what they’ll do with the address once they have it (no disclaimers that your e-mail will not be passed on, for instance). They’d better not abuse it, or I’ll be livid.
* Their introduction once you’ve signed up is puny, and seems to promote their official, pre-set-up feeds over telling you how to subscribe to pages that aren’t listed.
* Because it’s a browser extension, it stays on whatever computer you’ve installed it. It’s a local yokel only. Bloglines has the very favorable point of being accessible from whatever computer you’re using, wherever that may be, as long as you remember your account name and password.
That’s about all I have to offer on Pluck at this point. I’ll set about adding more feeds and testing its lag time, and comparing that to Bloglines’ lag time (as of this writing [circa 5:30 in the evening], I don’t think my previous post from circa 10:00 this morning had popped up on BL, so any improvement by Pluck will be welcome).
DragonCon Update. Neither Sarah nor I went to DragonCon today; too many crowds. I was toying with the idea of going by myself — the hosting hotels are only about 10 minutes from my flat, and I do have a four-day pass — but while I was thinking about it I fell asleep. Probably a sign that I needed a day of recovery, if I conk out into a dead-to-the-world nap after having slept close to 12 hours the night before. Must’ve been more tired than I’d realized.
Update: It seems that there is a Web-based version of Pluck, which allows you to access your bookmarks and feeds on any computer, a la Bloglines. In the twenty or so minutes since I first posted this, Pluck has not noticed the new entry — even when I click on the “Update Feed” button. However, 20 minutes of lag is nothing compared to Bloglines, which is still ignorant not only of this post or the one from this morning, but also of the ridiculous number of DragonCon pics I uploaded this morning to Flickr about five and a half hours ago. Frustration every way you turn, unfortunately.
