Bloglines was acting weird a few weeks ago. It showed new posts on the left pane, but when you clicked on the feed it showed no new entries on the right pane. After a few days of this I got fed up and began looking for a replacement.

I wanted a free, online RSS reader because one, I’m cheap, and two, I don’t want to be tied to a particular machine to browse RSS feeds.

Here are the feed readers that fit the bill.

Rojo
Google Reader
NewsGator Online

After importing my list of sites, I tried using each of them but I wasn’t impressed. Rojo was the closest to what I was looking for but the interface was much slower than Bloglines. NewsGator was the worst of the bunch, and Google Reader was decent, but it was still slower than Bloglines and didn’t give me any compelling reasons to change. They’ve just announced some more changes so I’ll definitely keep an eye on them but for now, I’m sticking with Bloglines. They fixed the problems I was having and they’ve also made improvements, like not updating the entire left pane when the counts change and decreasing the time between automatic updates to your unread counts.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a few years now, so I enjoyed seeing what else is out there. For me, Bloglines is still the best free, online feed reader around, and I’m once again a loyal fan.

I even switched back to Bloglines for my Blogroll (the old blogroll using links in Wordpress were woefully out of date.) What you now see in the blogroll is what I’m currently reading, and I don’t have to do anything extra to keep it up-to-date.