Google Reader

Google released Reader, an online aggregator. At the moment I’m not very impressed with it. First it gave some errors while using it (Server error, please try again in 30 seconds), and importing my subscriptions from Bloglines didn’t seem to have any result. But today I tried again and now it worked ok, so perhaps it was just a hiccup.

The way Reader presents new articles doesn’t really fit my reading habits of scanning for interesting articles, because you only see one article at a time. Strangely enough articles are sorted by ‘relevance’ by default. I’m curious what defines the relevance of an article? You can switch to sort by date, which means you see the most recent articles first.

You can’t get to the bottom of the list of unread articles. To catch up sometimes I read articles from back to front, but that’s not possible here.

I know the service is only a beta, but Google, where are the improvements over existing services? Perhaps you’re interested in some suggestions:

• Show more articles at once.
• Add a way to switch between titles and full articles, perhaps like the way e-mail conversations are presented in GMail.
• Let me choose the subscription to see articles from: all, subscriptions with a label or a single subscription.
• Include the number of unread articles for subscriptions and labels.
• Add support for e-mail subscriptions for example by extending the filter options from GMail.
• Show incoming links from other sites to an article.
• RSS/Atom support?

Harnessing the BackPack API – Part I

The article Harnessing the BackPack API takes a look at the BackPack API and puts it to use with C#. This first article covers how to set up a free BackPack account, grab the XML Token needed, and delve into connecting to the server to send commands and data back and forth. We’ll do this by building a rough Windows Forms application that models all of the available operations for just the BackPack page object.

The next two articles will flesh out the rest of the API, improve the UI for our application, and then play around with XML serialization and other goodness to make BackPack portable.