At first I used RSS Bandit to aggregate my RSS Feeds. It worked fairly well, but I had a few issues with it… mainly the fact that items I read on my desktop would still be unread on my laptop. Trying to keep it synchronized in my head as far as which items I had already read was just too much. It may not sound like a big deal, but if you read say 30 items on your computer, to read another 30 new items on another computer you have to potentially process twice as many items (60 items = 30 old + 30 new). Then if you have a third computer on which you read RSS feeds (say at work), forget about it.

Then I started using the news reader I wrote Vein News. With a proprietary folder structure and some XML, multiple computers could share a data store which would then make read items marked as read on all computers sharing the same data store. This also had the fortunate (and somewhat planned) advantage that any of the computers could update the store which kept it more synchronized than a laptop with on-at-times-off-at-times uptime would have. It had another advantage of still having access to all your feeds if your Internet connection ever goes down (something that online news readers are susceptible to).

I kept my RSS aggregator up to date over the years and had it compiling to a desktop version and a Pocket PC version by simply opening either the dsw or vcw workspaces. The main problems I had with this approach was:

1. I was the one that had to keep it up to date, add new features and fix all bugs. This is both good and bad. It was exactly what I needed it to be, but anything I found that needed to be fixed would stay broken until I found time to fix it. And since time is at a premium these days (even though I still find time in the wee hours of the night to blog)…
2. I still had the problem of keeping the home feed store in sync with the work feed store. That could be fixed with keeping the feed store on a flash drive, but then if the flash drive isn’t plugged in and Vein News wasn’t running, it gets out of sync quickly.

Then a few months ago I decided I would give Google Reader a try. A couple friends of mine use it and I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Then around the same time, I started using the Internet access on my phone. Since I can get to any regular Internet page, I could access my Google Reader feeds too… and everything in is sync. No matter where I read my feeds, whether it’s at work, at home, on my phone, or at my parents’ house, my feed items are always marked appropriately. Also, if the Internet does go down for a few hours or even a few days at my house, I can still read feeds through my phone and vice versa. I am always connected. And that holds true while I’m out and about standing in line at the post office or waiting in the dentist’s office.

The always connectedness and complete synchronization of the feeds with Google Reader is basically everything you (well, everything I) would ever need in a reader. And then with the recent addition of offline mode to Google Reader… I mean come on.