Planet vs. Bloglines
Soon after posting my quick experiences with Planet, I received a suggestion from Brent O’Connor to check out Bloglines. Bloglines is a free (and apparently quite popular) service for aggregating blogs similar to Planet plus a bunch of other functionality as well. Sounded good to me, so I decided to try it out. Soon after experimenting with Bloglines, I received a pm on EnterTheGame asking for a comparison of the two. Another great idea.
So, as a way of collecting my own notes and sharing a bit with anyone that’s curious, here is my comparison/contrast of Planet vs. Bloglines.
Methodology
First, there’s an immediate difference in the methodology between Planet and Bloglines.
Planet is a quick and simple Python script that takes a set of feed URI’s, a touch of metadata, and generates a single HTML page with all of the posts in chronological order. That’s it, the whole enchilada. As such, Planet is very simple to use, but certainly requires a certain amount of base knowledge to use. Things like editing text files on a web server and setting up a cron job are expected prerequisites. No problem for me or most people that Planet serves. It has a very “do it yourself” kind of feel, it’s one web tool in the toolbox of self-sufficient web usage.
Bloglines, on the other hand, is a fully featured, fully loaded, full service, feed aggregation and blog publishing service provider. It’s apparent in the feel that this is a group of people providing services to web users of all skill levels. I would imagine that little background knowledge is necessary to make full use of Bloglines’ functionality. It also makes an attempt to be not just one web tool in the toolbox, but a complete toolbox for feed handling. A noble goal, for sure.
Planet vs. Bloglines winner in this category? Tie. There is nothing wrong with either methodology. It just depends on what the user is looking for.
Feed Support
It’s kind of sad, but landscape the blogosphere is a nasty conglomerate of feed types in varying stages of compliance with a range of standards. As such, the ability of any truely useful application is often measured by the range of well-formed (and perhaps mal-formed) feeds that it can handle.
Planet appears to have problems with the RSS feeds available from Xanga. I have this hunch that these feeds fall into the “mal-formed” category of RSS feeds, but it would still be nice if they were handled in such a fashion that the nastiness of the Xanga feed generation were invisible to the user. One can read my previous post for how mangled it is. Also, generally speaking, Planet uses a tool written out-of-house for handling it’s feed parsing. So these problems might not be in Planet code proper, but I’m still going to refer to them as “planet problems”.
Bloglines, on the other hand, seems to be able to handle Xanga feeds superbly. I have a feeling this has very little to do with standards compliance, and instead a lot to do with some custom handling of Xanga’s nastiness. In fact, when adding feeds to Bloglines there are four methodologies available. First, you can just enter the URI of a blog or a feed. If you enter the URI of a blog, it will attempt to find a feed and if you enter the URI of a feed… well that’s just kind of obvious. The other three methods for adding feeds are to enter the username of a blog writer from the providers Blogger, LiveJournal, or Xanga, respectively. Bloglines then takes care of the rest for finding the feed and adding a subscription. It kind of makes me cringe as a standards-loving geek that this is necessary, but I think this is definitely the best way to handle it for the vast majority of users.
Bloglines vs. Planet? Bloglines, definitely. Planet is definitely written to the “general case” and in the case of Xanga, it shows. Bloglines definitely felt like it was “right”, even if the implementation under the hood might be nasty. But then again, a user doesn’t have to worry about the source of a provided service, heh heh.
Extra Features
Planet doesn’t really have any extra features. It does generate a few feeds for the entire aggregated stream, which is nice. But besides that, Planet does only what it set out to do, generate a static HTML page after aggregating the given feeds. Very UNIX like, “do one thing and do it well”.
Bloglines has a load of extra features. You can arrange feeds into “folders” like categories, read them based on those categories or all at once. It has a dynamic presentation, rather than a static presentation, and as such you can do things like “view the posts from the last 24 hours” and stuff like that. In fact, by default Bloglines only displays the posts that are new since your last visit. Pretty cool idea, kind of turns blog reading towards the email reading paradigm rather than the web reading paradigm. One can even enable an email notification for when a feed has updated. I’ve probably only scratched the surface, but Bloglines seems to provide a lot. (I didn’t even mention the fact that they also do blog hosting and publication.
Display
Planet provides a robust templating system that allows the user to pretty much generate anything that they can think up. Provided that they know how to edit a template file, anyway. This is readily apparent when cruising around other sites that use Planet and see just how much variance that there is.
Bloglines has a pretty basic and rigid display, no doubt a concerted effort between their datamodel decisions for all of those features and their desire for consistant branding for the service they provide.
Planet vs. Bloglines? I think Planet has to take the cake on this one. While some may love Bloglines interface, I don’t know how being able to output anything can be beat.
Conclusion
This is where this relatively objective review turns into a wholly opinionated blog entry. If you’re really wondering which you should use between Planet and Bloglines, focus on the top part of this “review”. 
Display is really the most important part of a blog aggregator for me, and this is where Planet plays it’s trump. While Bloglines does a great job of moving the paradigm of reading blog entries to more of a piece-meal email reading type of activity, that’s really just not what I want. I read blogs as part of my morning, daily, and nightly reading routine, one that is quite comfortably set in the reading webpages/reading a newspaper paradigm. And while Bloglines can also be set to show all the posts in a given range, those posts are always grouped by the feed. I adore how the default Planet output is to have all blog entries sorted into one chronology. I just find this more entertaining and vibrant to read, especially with the right theme. I can’t get Bloglines to reproduce this configuration.
Feed support is also important, but I think I might be able to get around the problems myself. I could either patch the library Planet uses to handle Xanga feeds as a special case, or more likely I’ll try some free service like FeedBurner to do all of the heavy lifting.
Methodology is completely a personal preference, and so I consider this the least important aspect of the service. I lean towards “do-it-yourself” kinds of tools, so I guess Planet wins for me personally in this regard.
In closing, Bloglines is pretty damn cool… but I think I’m going to keep working on my Planet based aggregator to see if I can get it to the state that I want it to be.
July 1st, 2005 at 9:25 am
Thanks Ash. I guess my little question on ETG spawned a wonderful and concise point by point analysis of these services. As you said sometimes what’s under the hood isn’t the focus. Now I see why someone such as yourself with a more extensive knowledge of “whats under there” would use Planet. I just found Bloglines to be a godsend with the bunch of blogs and RSS feeds I read. Thanks again for the review.