I finally made the decision to dump SharpReader. The massive memory utilization (100+ MB) combined with the myriad of alert toast popups finally sealed the deal. Currently, I’m using intraVnews and I’m going to try out the new NewsGator when it’s available.

Reading blogs in Outlook does take some getting used to. Search Folders makes it easier, but then my feeds are sorted alphabetically rather than by the feed category (i.e. the parent folder). Is there a hotkey or shortcut for jumping to the next unread item (even if it’s in a different folder) when using the reading pane? Also, I’m used to deleting emails after I’ve read them but I’m used to letting posts get deleted when they are a couple weeks old. IntraVnews supports this option, but maybe I’m better off treating posts like email and deleting them when I’m done.

Don mentioned he was going to roll his own blog engine so he can use it for experimentation. (I’d link to the entry bu permalinks seem to be broken in his current blog engine). I keep thinking of the same thing about news readers.

Update: thanks to Wesner Moise for pointing out to me in my comments how to turn off the alert toast popups. However, I’m still going to stick it out with an Outlook based solution. Luckily, I’m not like most ‘softies w/ a ton of unread email in my inbox so the built-in search folder works fine.

So it was a year ago today that I started this blog. It’s interesting to see how much has changed in that time. My son was born, I switched jobs, I got an article published in MSDN and even my wife is blogging now. And I’m even blogging this from Phoenix where I started blogging in the first place!

I was in Phoenix for a local architect roundtable event. It went great. I was filling in for a teammate who had a conflict, but I hope to do more of these in the future as it’s a chance to interact directly with the architect community. I presented Metropolis – we’re working on getting more info about that up on architecture center very soon. I also got a chance to do my “performance doesn’t matter” rant discussion that seems to always come up when you start talking about building services. I’ll blog that later, I’ve got a plane to catch.