Yesterday’s big news was FeedDemon’s integration with Bloglines. Today’s big news is that FeedDemon now offers integration with NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) as well.
Some FeedDemon users may recognize NewsGator as the company that makes an RSS plugin for Microsoft Outlook which is often considered a competitor to FeedDemon, but it’s perhaps not as well known that they’ve branched out into web-based syndication services.
Here’s how to use FeedDemon’s NGOS integration:
- Select File > New > New Channel Group (Shift+Ctrl+N)
- Choose “Create a new channel group for my NewsGator subscriptions” then click Next
- Enter a title for your NewsGator channel group, then click Next
- Click Finish to close the “New Channel Group” wizard
After creating your new channel group, FeedDemon will display the “Add NewsGator Channel” wizard, which shows a list of feeds in your NGOS subscriptions and enables adding them to FeedDemon.
As you can see, the NGOS integration works exactly the same as the integration with Bloglines, due in large part to the fact that they use a similar (pseudo) RESTful method of feed synching. I’m glad that after approaching me with different APIs, both Bloglines and NGOS ended up using the method I suggested instead.
I plan to write more about this later, but for now I’d like to recommend that other web services that want RSS readers to integrate with them offer a similar approach. Expecting every RSS reader to implement a different API (or SOAP interface) for each service is unreasonable when every RSS reader already supports simple HTTP GET. If you want widespread adoption, make it easy for us to adopt you.
Anyway, enough about that: stop by the FeedDemon Beta Site to download FeedDemon 1.5 beta 1a. The release notes have been updated to reflect the changes in this build.