I tried using an RSS aggregator, but it didn’t fit the way that I wanted to work.  All of the feeds are trapped on the machine running the aggregator.  I wanted to be able to get to them from work and home.  Web-based aggregators solve that issue but still fell flat for me because I never remembered to go check them.  I wanted something that would deliver everything to me in the one application that I have access to from work and home (RPC over HTTP) and that I run all of the time: Outlook.

Rob Caron told me about Squeet when I was in Redmond in March, and I started using it then and never looked back.  Squeet is a web site where you can subscribe to RSS feeds, and it emails you the posts from the feed.  And they have a little browser add-in (IE and Firefox) so that all you have to do to subscribe to an RSS feed on a web page is hit the green button (I’ve installed it on every machine where I use IE).  I set up one rule in Outlook to send the emails to my Blog Feeds folder (anything from DoNotReply@squeet.com), and I’ve been happily reading blogs ever since.  I can flag a post in Outlook, forward it to someone, or delete it when I’m done with it.  And I get the same consistent view in Outlook at home.

Here’s what a post looks like.  It has the formatting and images of the original post.

I really think Squeet rocks.  It’s the one thing that has met my needs for keeping up with the blogs that I read.