philwilson.org

Kinja gets it right

26 December, 2004

Kinja is the web aggregator everyone forgot.

When I go somewhere without my computer and I want to check up on my feeds, I don’t log into my Bloglines page, I load my Kinja page.

Not only is it incredibly simple (in fact so simple that at first I didn’t get what use it was, and like everyone else, it seems, stopped using it once I’d first signed up back in April) but it’s fast because it gives you the first X words of every post too, so you can skim through just as fast as you like, not worrying about ‘read items per feed’ and all that rubbish. If you find a post you want to read later, you don’t mark it as unread, or flag it or whatever, you bookmark or del.icio.us the sucker!

If you’re scared stiff of missing even one post, and you’re subscribed to 100+ sites, then Kinja isn’t for you. But if you’re subscribed to that number or less and you’re not worried about missing one post because you know if it was important it’ll come up again, then you’ll be just fine (and hey, that’s what subscribable Feedster and PubSuv searches are for, right?).

It’s the perfect light tool for non-obsessives (although I know there are plenty out there, I was one myself for a while).

The bad side: sadly, Kinja doesn’t always seem to get it right, Or rather, it probably gets the basics right, but isn’t quite clever enough – as of writing, two posts that Leigh Dodds made back in September are at the top of my reading list as having been posted “2 hours ago”. I’d like to think that something with his RSS publishing has just gone wrong, and Kinja’s reflecting that, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. An inspection of his RSS 1.0 file shows that their time/date stamp is as it should be. This happens every now and again (read: frequently enough to be obviously noticable) and is a pain in the arse but the occassional duplicated items is still worth the simplicity and ease you get the rest of the time.

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in December 2004.