Last time I tried to complain about missing functionality at Bloglines I got everything wrong. I acknoledged the fact, but my ego wanted a revenge. It wanted me to find something that is really missing so that I could write a proper post on the subject. After lots of thinking and playing around with other tools, I finally found a good issue to complain about – synchronization automation.
Here is what I mean.
Bloglines has a very convenient way of adding feeds from several other sites. For example, it allows to easily add LiveJournal diaries by just specifying a LiveJournal user account in a dedicated form field. This makes things easy when you only want to add one or two feeds.
The complication comes when you want to synchronize your LiveJournal friends with Bloglines subscriptions. For example, take me. According to my LiveJournal profile I am reading 39 friends and 4 communities. If I wanted to read all of them via Bloglines I would have to add them manually one by one. This is a pain.
Bloglines has a competitor in the Russian segment of the Web. It is Yandex.Lenta (the website is all in Russian). I tried it and found that it offers some really good tools for importing and exporting subscriptions. One could give an OPML subscription list via file upload or URL location, for example. It also has some synchronization tools. Specifically, one for LiveJournal. All you have to do to import your LiveJournal friends into Yandex.Lenta is specify your LiveJournal username.
But Yandex.Lenta isn’t perfect either. The thing is, my LiveJournal list of friends and communities changes rather often (at least once a week). I would like to use LiveJournal’s functionality to control the list of friends, while I still want to be able to read them via Bloglines (or Yandex.Lenta for that matter). To do that comfortably, I need a “Re-synchronize subscriptions” functionality. In this way, I could create a folder for my LiveJournal subscriptions and easily update the list from my LiveJournal profile. The whole thing can be even done automatically every once in a while.
Now, I think I got it this time…