Today I read Tris Hussey‘s account of his appearance at Northern Voice, where he mentions Lektora. Lektora is a browser based RSS reader, created in Canada. Tris demo-ed an integration of both Qumana and Lektora. Qumana is a tool that can be used as the hub in your personal information flow. I use Qumana to collect items that catch my eye, and afterwards I can work on those items, turning them into blog-content or other documents. Qumana lets me post directly into each of my blogs, or save it to my hard disk. Both Qumana and Lektora are in beta, and need work to be able to please larger audiences. But they serve me fine, and I don’t mind the opportunity to be able to help shape a tool by providing feedback.

Up until now I used RSSReader to read my feeds, which has quite a market share here in the Netherlands, but I am not really convinced that it functions correctly. Feeds disappear, and old posts suddenly pop up as new, even though they don’t show up in the XML feed.

The appeal of Lektora for me is that it is browser based, written in Javascript mostly, but all data is stored locally on my machine. It imports and exports OPML, which allows easy synchronization with Bloglines which I use to create blogrolls. Lektora needs some work on two aspects: First, I want to control all settings and aspects of appearance myself, and that is not possible yet. Second, at some points it makes decisions for me which I cannot roll back if I want to, nor prevent. This is the type of behaviour I severely dislike in Windows apps: assuming it knows best. I understand you have to be able to take decisions when users don’t want to or aren’t able to, but you also have to accomodate those of us who both can and want to be behind the wheel ourselves.

[Update] Apparantly Lektora under Windows requires me to run both IE 6 and Firefox if I want to install it properly. No problem on my company laptop that has both, but a big problem on my Windows desktop where I deliberately disabled IE because it was hindering my attempts to remove adware. This is a deal-breaker to me. Why is it that it will only run under Firefox when IE is enabled as well? Time to test the new Linux-comatable version on my Linux desktop, and see how it works there.