I've started using a news aggregator again. I used to use Radio Userland but found it to be slow, buggy, and a bit of a memory hog. Once they started a $40 per annum licensing fee I decided to switch off it for both aggregation and blogging.

Anyway, for most of the past year I've just relied on opening sites in tabs, using Opera or Firefox. This isn't that bad, I can see quickly whether or not something's updated and close the window if it hasn't. But it's also a bit of a black hole time wise since I invariably go clicky-clicky on another link, or ad and end up wasting an hour.

Bloglines is a simple web based news aggregator. I played with it briefly last year but didn't get into using it. I returned to it earlier this month and imported all of the blogs/newsfeeds I've been reading and have really enjoyed using it. It's totally plain, no ads (yet), few graphics. I'm sure there's other aggregators out there but I just wanted one that works, wasn't a pain to set up and use, and just works (again).

One minor problem I've run into is with the display of my blogroll on my homepage. It's done through a JavaScript file downloaded from bloglines.com. The javascript isn't encoded in any particular character encoding. My site is (well, should be) in the UTF-8 encoding. The problem shows up with the link for Michael Bérubé. The website encodes the e-acute character as either é or é. But the XML feed serves the raw 0xE9 character. I'm not sure that's even wrong, I don't know UTF-8 well enought. Anyway, that 0xe9 character gets scooped up by bloglines and then served to my site in the JavaScript. I'm not sure if JavaScript has a default encoding but it ends up as a junk character on my site (using Firefox on Windows XP).

I'm going to see if I can proxy the Javascript request and clean the feed myself (converting the 0xe9 to the é character, I guess I'm assuming the javascript is in win-1252 or iso-8859).