RSS, not Rodents of Unusual Size
RSS can be a really cool technology. I love having up to the minute data flood in, washing over me like a briny wave of cold saltwater that chaffed my crotch and I had to take a shower. The bad part is that I haven’t really loved any of the available readers out there.
Don’y get me wrong, I think Sage is a great extension and it looks really slick, but I don’t like the fact that I lose screen real estate. It’s nothing against Sage, I just dislike all sidebar options.
I was talking to Josh the other day about this. He recommended NewsGator which seems to run well. I have also played around with Google Reader, which I didn’t really groove on at first, but I’m a Google whore, so I kind of like it now.
What RSS readers do you guys use? What would you like in one that none of them serve now? Web-based or extensions?
I’m in the beginnings of learning Ruby, and was hesitantly planning a long term goal of putting out a project that would be mostly Ruby on Rails mixed with some AJAX to wind up with a keen web-based RSS reader. Who knows if that will ever come to fruition, but I’m definitely going to give it a shot.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:41 am
i was hoping the podcast would be your lilting voice reading the words, such that i might finally get some sleep…instead, it was HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 4th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
First off. Let’s not call it RSS but webfeeds! It’s the worst acronym ever.
(It’s a personal thing, don’t let it bother you. :-))
But on the reader front:
Online – Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) & FF Live Bookmarks (www.getfirefox.com)
Windows – FeedDemon (www.feeddemon.com)
Mac – NetNewsWire (ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
Note that I’m deliberately avoiding newsgat… Although they’ve bought the latter two excellent desktop products, their online version sucks. As does their Outlook version.
I must admit that I mostly (99% of the time) grab my daily news-shot from Bloglines & Live bookmarks, because they’re so convenient. If I want to do some deep trawling, it’s the desktop stuff.
Let me just round things up by saying I hate the Outlookish/e-mail approach of many readers out there. Feeds are not e-mail. It’s a *cough* ‘river of news’ in which you’ll have to sift the gems from the pebles yourselves.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:03 am
http://www.mincus.com/images/minccam.jpg
I
May 9th, 2006 at 10:44 am
http://www.netvibes.com/
May 15th, 2006 at 6:34 am
Exactly the problem that bothered me for a while. The requirement that the RSS reader should be portable (flash drive) made it even harder for me to pick one.
Then I went to uncle google, did some searches for a php rss aggregator, found one that seemed to suid my needs, tweaked a bit and — voila! My very portable RSS reader. ;)
May 18th, 2006 at 10:16 am
I personally like Reader ‘cuz I can use it anywhere and it is really useful. They’re still tryin’ to work out the kinks (like searching past posts), by I would definitely watchit if I were you.
May 19th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Sorry to disappoint, Esteban. I think a podcast of me speaking would drive people away rather than lull them to sleep.
Miha, that script sounds useful. Do you have a link?
I’m starting to enjoy Google Reader more and more. It does what I want it to and isn’t bloated at all.
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Can we get bugmenot for Thunderbird to enable RSS feeds from blogs that require login?
(I’m posting here rather than having my comment be buried at the bottom of the bugmenot blog comments. I use Thunderbird to read several blogs via rss. One blog is from a newspaper columnist and the paper has suddenly decided that users need to login to read the blog. I can’t login in thunderbird, trying to do this brings up the blog in my browser (Firefox) which works but is annoying and not the UI I want when I’m reading in my email client (Thunderbird). Is there any chance you can extend bugmenot to work in Thunderbird so I can continue to read this blog in my preferred blog-reading client?)
Please?
Thanks!!!
June 26th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
I’m a Sage gal, but wishing like hell it could open in a background tab rather than via the Sidebar. (I hate sidebar apps!)
July 20th, 2006 at 10:42 am
The reason I have never tried NewsGator is because of the spyware application called Gator. I guess my mind has automatically associated any application with the word ‘Gator’ in it with spyware.
I use Google Reader for now.
July 23rd, 2006 at 4:02 am
Check out newshutch.com. It’s fairly new, but I like it a lot. Best reader design I’ve seen. There are working on the next version of the code.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Rather than use a conventional reader, I much prefer to use rssfwd, which will email new entries to you when they come out. It works very well with GMail, it’ll even group entries by sources, if you wish. This makes it so that instead of multiple Slashdot (for example) entries showing up per day, they all appear under one conversation, and then you can click it and read each of them by just scrolling down the page.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
I’ve been looking for a good (free) desktop reader myself lately, I’ve tried about half a dozen of them so far. None have impressed me yet, for what it’s worth though, the best thing I’ve found so far is “Great News” (http://www.curiostudio.com/). It runs straight from the .exe so it’s portable, it’s got a few different reading styles you can choose according to prefference, and it’s got an integrated tabbed browser, which I find to be most important. The biggest downside is that it’s in beta, and from what I hear the release version will either be ad-supported or no longer free.
August 9th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Go here, get it, solve your problems:
http://www.klipfolio.com/
August 25th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
RSS is realy cool technology. I`m use this one year…
October 5th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Feedreader is definitely the best, and it’s free and open source. www . feedreader . com
The Smartfeed facility is really good!