As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Google Reader fanatic. Nothing else handles RSS as smoothly as it does.

The one gigantic failing of Google Reader is that you cannot receive password-protected feeds that request user authentication. I think that sucks. A lot.

So I created a Yahoo Pipe to work around this failing.

I got the following message in my RSS feeds this morning:

Thanks for your interest in the Bastard Operator from Hell. Simon Travaglia, the author of BOFH, has asked us to remove links to his articles from our RSS feeds. We will not restore the BOFH RSS feeds without his permission.

BOFH (short for Bastard Operator From Hell) is one of many columns in The Register, an IT-related news site. I was a subscriber to a feed that only gave me the hilarious stories of the Bastard, and I enjoyed reading them.

Today’s pick isn’t Mac-specific software, but rather a web based goodie from Google. You see, Google just updated Google Reader, their web-based RSS reader.

First, let me just say that I am a firm devotee of online RSS readers. I have a license to NetNewsWire, and I love it. It’s a great program. However, when I’m not at a Mac or not at my computer at all, it’s useless to me. Furthermore, online readers (if they’re good) fit seamlessly into my browsing experience. It’s all in one application, and serves as a launchpad for all my daily reading.

At last count, I had a few hundred RSS feeds in my NewsGator web reader. These represent a few thousand headlines every day, and it’s rare that I’m able to read all of them.

As a result of this, I get very stressed when I start reading. I’ll click on my “news” group (which is the largest group, post-wise, generating 300+ new headlines every day), and cringe as I work through 5-10 pages of headlines. Even with my triage-then-read approach (I “clip” interesting headlines and then revist them when I have more time, part of an effort to keep my RSS influx managed), it takes ages to get through all this, and I can’t help but think it isn’t useful.

A simple script for your script menu. Take the current page in OmniWeb and passes it to NetNewsWire as a new subscription. I can’t stand OmniWeb’s bookmark-driven RSS reader, so this does the trick for me.