At Curtin we set up almost all our web content as universally available (open to the world and beyond). If it’s not meant for anyone but students then it’s password protected, not IP protected.

Why would your library feeds not be available from people out on the net using bloglines?

Feeds are just served out using http just like web pages. If people outside the campus can see the web pages there should be no reason why they they couldn’t see the feeds.

Unless of course Murdoch has done something silly and the web server is blocking all https traffic that doesnt have a .html extension. That would be highly unusual and very short sighted though.

Eventually - and we’re talking a lot of months - our university student portal should allow people to set up their own feeds. That’s a big advantage for user ed. classes, helping people on the ref desk and allowing access to authentication only resources - as the user will have to authenticate initially so we can just pass the feeds straight to them.

BUT..until that day, I have the same dilemma as you. Bloglines is a bit like odeo - a great idea that worked very well for a long time, but now seem to have reach unacceptable inefficiency - possibly due to such a high demand. Classic victim of its own success.

My gut feeling is to get them a google account and show them the reader. Don’t mention all the other fun stuff you can do with a google acct, just treat it like a regular aggregator.

Netvibes would also be an interesting alternative.

I considered for about 5 seconds showing people the feed reader in Firefox, but that isn’t our SOE. We haven’t even had IE7 approved for on campus use The big advantage is that IP protected feeds (like for our internal blog) can be read by a browser on an IP allowed machine, but not via an external machine service like bloglines or google reader. How to cope with these is still a problem for me. Any ideas?