Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Syncing your RSS feeds across multiple computers

As many of you know, I use several PCs regularly.  There’s the work PC, my personal PC, and a laptop that I use.  The work and personal PC are both at my desk, just on opposite sides.  I switch back and forth using a super cool KVM switch that supports dual monitors (anyone know of a KVM for triple monitors?).

As such, it is pretty frustrating for me to have data on one machine and not the other; I use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitors to interact with each PC, so it always feels like I am using the same PC.

I found Live Mesh, and I freaking love it.  I have all my docs synced, as well as my favorites folder, and some other random folders.  I’ve used up about half of my online storage space :).

So, I’ve got most of my stuff synced between these three machines, but my RSS feeds were a sticking point.  Previously I’d used outlook to synchronize between the two primary PCs.  This requires having outlook set up to connect to my MS account from my home machine, though, and I’ve not had a need for it yet.  I wanted another solution, and figured Mesh was a good place to start.

I found a blog posting that pointed me right where I needed to be: http://www.windowsobserver.com/tag/common-feed-list/.  The key part of this article is the location of the feeds files: c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds.  So I added the Feeds folder to my Mesh, and voila, I have sync’ed feeds!

3 comments:

Mike said...

Hi Cullen,

Thanks for this post, especially the tip at the bottom to find the feeds from my IE8 to sync across machines. I took a look at Live Mesh (also recommended by an MS staffer who saw my blog post on http://wordpress.mintzwords.com about Drop Box), but like many things MS does, I find it tangled compared to DB. When I get back to my PC tomorrow night I will try your trick with my DB folders. I'll tell you about it once I try it.

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Anonymous said...

I get an error in Mesh saying "Folders in this location can't be synced"