Angry in the Great White North

Reading news on a BlackBerry is not easy.  There is a built-in browser, but like most mobile browsers, it suffers from the lack of screen space.  Visit in a site that uses Java or complicated style sheets optimized for large screen, and many pages become a jumble of unconnected nonsense.

Some sites spend the money on professional web designs that reconfigure based on the device being used to render the page, but they are the exception.  For instance, a Globe and Mail page has a helpful "Skip Navigation" link that takes you directly to the content, but Sun Media sites force you to scroll through menu after menu laid out vertically.

By the way, that's why my blog is laid out with content on the left, and not menus.  That way on a mobile device, when the style sheet is ignored, you see content first, not navigation.

Really, RSS feeds are the way to go.  By definition, a syndicated feed is just content, with virtually no layout information.  The feed reader worries about that, with a feed reader optimized for the device to which it is targeted.

I've never been satisfied with the feed readers I've seen for the BlackBerry.  Today I found one, called Viigo, that has me impressed.

Create a free account, then install the application over the network.  Here's the nice thing -- you can configure your subscriptions on a webpage associated with your account.  The BlackBerry application will re-synchronize and pick up any changes.

That makes for a very user-friendly solution.  Visiting different web pages and grabbing their feeds is easily done on a laptop.  Set up your feeds the way you want them, and the next time you're mobile with the BlackBerry, you have your feeds on the go.

Your Viigo account page can read in OPML files so you can set up multiple feeds simultaneously.  If you like, here is a selection of RSS news feeds for Canadians I've put together (right-click the link and save it, or provide the URL http://stevejanke.com/archives/canadian_news_feeds.opml to your feed reader if it can pull an OPML file from the web).

If you use the online feed reader services Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or Google Reader, you can direct Viigo to pull your feed lists over.

If you use a BlackBerry (and many of my readers do), try out Viigo for yourself.  You can grab my OPML file to initialize your account with a selection of useful Canadian news feeds.

Did I mention it was free?  Very nice indeed.

Addendum: What do I use on my laptop?  I like Omea from JetBrains.