Professor Geek

Generally, my aggregator of choice has been SharpReader. Why? Because it works well, is fast, works in the background (like most aggregators should), is easy to organize, and can export files. So why did I try out some server-based alternatives? Well, here’s the problem: I work on several computers, as I have mentioned before, and an aggregator is much more difficult to keep synchronized than, say, your MS Word documents file. In the first place, it’s always working. In the second place, there just isn’t an easy way to update the data and synchronize it between computers.

It would seem, then, that an Internet-accessible server-based aggregator might be a possible solution for someone like me. After all, I could access the reader and my feeds from anywhere on the Internet, and it would alleviate the problem of synchronization. Alas, it really isn’t the case. First, I tried downloading and installing my own server-based solution, Gregarius. It worked fine, and I was able to import my feed list from SharpReader. But it was slow and had some issues. Being open source software, I don’t think it has matured yet to the point I would like, and some of the features I was used to in the desktop solution just weren’t there. Then I found GoogleReader. While it works better than Gregarius, and has the advantage of me not having to run it on my server, it also lacks some of the components I am used to in SharpReader.

Having tried the server-based solution, I went back to the desktop solution I was using and looked for an easy way to synchronize. In reading the documentation for SharpReader, I found out that if I copied an entire directory from one computer to another, the SharpReader installations on my various computers would stay up to date. So here was my strategy, which I have been successfully using for the past week or so: Since I have a thumb drive that I use for synchronization anyway, I just started copying that SharpReader directory, in its entirety (it isn’t that big) every time I sync my other files. I has worked like a charm and only takes a few seconds. When I am about to leave a computer and move to working on another one, I shut down SharpReader, copy the requisite directory to my thumb drive, and move on to the next computer. When I arrive at that one, I copy the folder from the thumb drive to the proper location on the hard drive and then load SharpReader, which I leave running until I leave that computer, at which time I repeat the process.

It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works for me.

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