Benevolent Misanthropy

I’m sorry, but I just don’t like it.

It is, I should note, quite a bit more stable than Lektora (which is a beta, after all).

But apart from that, and the fact that its feed list is kept in Firefox’s bookmarks (redundancy is a good thing!), I am frustrated by much of how it chooses to do things.

For instance, where Lektora only listed sites that had updates, sage lists all the sites in a feed, and bolds the updated ones. I can see the arguments for it working this way, but when I ask for new posts, I only really want to see new posts. If’n I want old posts, I’ll go through the archived ones, mm’kay?

For another, Sage is s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-w. It does not seem to load its updates all at once. Each time I click on a feed in the list, it pauses, noodles around, twiddles its thumbs, and then—maybe—shows me the newest items. Lektora loaded all in one swell foop. Also, it must search a page for feeds, and sometimes does not find them after two minutes (locking that window up the entire time, by the by), when it’s sitting in plain view on my screen. Lektora allowed me to enter them by hand (well, by copy-and-paste, actually). sage insists that I add it as a bookmark, which I must ensure goes into the proper folder.

This brings up another bug feature that I just can’t fathom — if I switch tabs or windows while waiting, the new feed items will open in whatever window I’m looking at!!! Not like I was, you know, reading something there or anything, waiting for the pokey-arsed program to do its thing (which it should’a done when I first told it to, at least in my opinion—syndicated feeds are supposed to be loaded all at once, no? Otherwise what I’m doing is called “browsing the web”, for which I don’t need another program, thankyewveddymuch).

Another thing — marking items as read. Lektora assumed that, once I loaded all the new updates, I would read the ones I wanted and skipped the ones I didn’t. In other words, it “marked all read” automatically, but saved everything in an archive. Sage, contrariwise, has absolutely no way to mark an entire list of feeds read, you must go feed-by-feed, marking everything under each feed as read separately. Which, on your first time through a freshly-entered list of 100-odd feeds… kind of annoying. And time consuming.

It’s better than no RSS reader at all, but damn I hope Lektora updates to compatibility with 1.0.1 in a hurry.