Published in News, Rants and Ephemera on Friday, March 11th, 2005
Within all of the xmlHttpRequest and Ajax hooplah, I've discovered some cool new applications out there, and Feedmarker is one of them. I'm not the first to say it, but it's a little like del.icio.us + Bloglines meets Ajax.
I've recently been looking around for a new feed aggregator since dropping Opera, and while it is still in it's early stages, Feedmarker could be the answer.
While it does share a lot in common with del.icio.us and Bloglines, the beauty of it is that it is all right there in one place.
Another added bonus is the implementation of Harry Fuecks and Jason E. Sweat's jpspan to speed things up. Where copying a link in Del.icio.us takes a couple of page loads, at Feedmarker, adding a link (and later editing it) is done via xmlHttpRequest, and it's very very slick.
If you happen to have a client who wonders what all of the 'Ajax' fuss is about, 5 minutes with Feedmarker would make things very clear. If you're looking for an aggregator or bookmarker, be sure to give Feedmarker a look.
Like Jeremy Keith said, as long as it's backwards compatible.
However, it does look very neat. I should dive into it, and see what the real fuss is about.
Thanks for the nice comments.
Backwards compatibility is a big concern, but so is link structure. For Feedmarker I think it's important that you can browse using urls (like www.feedmarker.com/tags/webdev). If you load content exclusively through XmlHttpRequest (like Microsoft's experimental feed reader does) you end up with pages that can't be linked to.
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