Personally, I take my RSS injections via FeedDemon, but some people prefer to receive feeds via e-mail. That makes sense in at least one respect: they’ve already got tons of information flowing into that channel and they’ve learned how to sort, filter, and organize that mess — so why create another one?
Trying to be as inclusive as possible, I’ve had an R-mail subscription widget on my site for a while now. This fact was noticed by another RSS-to-email service named RSSGecko, and they sent me an e-mail asking if I would try out their service as a possible replacement for R-mail.
I have to admit, I had never signed up for R-mail myself. So, I signed up for both services to give them a fair comparison.
Here’s what the sign-up pages look like:
R-mail’s interface is kind of stark. Orange for RSS, I presume. RSSGecko uses cooler colors, and a cute gecko graphic.
R-mail: square corners. RSSGecko: rounded corners.
R-mail: simple form submission, no AJAX. RSSGecko uses AJAX-o-plenty, but it’s often jerky because the updated content resizes sections of the page.
But compared to the experience of subscribing to and managing feeds, the quality of the feed itself matters much more. Naturally, I signed up for my own feed, so let’s look at the results for the same post from each service (as viewed in MS Outlook 2003):
Which one would you rather read? If I’m aggregating my feeds into my Inbox, then that’s where I’d want to read them, wouldn’t you think? But RSSGecko apparently has no option for receiving the full text of the feed. Furthermore, there’s no link to the original article!
I rechecked the Advanced options in RSSGecko, and there’s nothing that says that it’s going to summarize posts. I did find checkboxes to eliminate links, images, and even all HTML, but none of those were checked. Sure looks like they were enabled though, doesn’t it? This entry didn’t have any images, but in other entries that did, R-mail placed them exactly where I had them in the post, while RSSGecko omitted them entirely.
R-mail does have more shameless promotion links added to the content. For instance, the “Share the Love” link in the image above links to an r-mail search, rather than to my own category page (“Share the Love” was my category for this post). And there’s the “Recommended Feeds” section — not sure how feeds can get themselves added there, but that’s nice exposure for them if they can. Nevertheless, I don’t find these extra links nearly as bothersome as missing a good deal of content and formatting.
R-mail apparently polls the feeds pretty regularly. I receive R-mail updates a short while after posting. RSSGecko, on the other hand, only gives you the option to receive updates for each feed once per day. That’s OK for some feeds, but not if you’re trying to stay on top of something like Techmeme.
In short, it seems to me that RSSGecko paid a lot more attention to the front end and first impressions, but lags a few laps behind R-mail on providing the basic service. And even if “a gecko, ‘e can be trusted,” that trust won’t last long if the goods aren’t delivered.
Disclaimer: R-mail is run by Randy Charles Morin. I know Randy Morin. Randy Morin is a friend of mine. And you’re no Randy Morin, you lazy little lizard.
The unlucky 13th began haunting me early this morning. My wife had asked me to scan something for her, and my HP Director software wouldn’t talk to the scanner. This has happened to me with this HP7310 in network mode several times in the past. Try resetting everything from power-up, and still no joy. I’ll probably have to reinstall the software to get it working again. Later.
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