I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect RSS reader or aggregator without much luck. I’ve downloaded lots, installed many and uninstalled all.
Here are my specifications. Let me know if something matches it.
- Client PC not web-based. I need speed to scan many feeds. Bloglines and the like are great but not fast enough.
- Windows (other operating systems a bonus). I’ve temporarily moved back to Windows XP so I’m stuck. I’d like whatever I chose to be cross platform for when I go back to SuSE Linux.
- River of News or display by date. I’d like to see today’s posts first across each group of feeds. That way if I miss a week I don’t have to wade through last weeks news from feed 1 to get to today’s news from feed 2.
- Not based on IE. I don’t like or trust their insecure browser and I definitely don’t want it processing XML data from potentially untrusted sources. That means if I right click on a link in a post I should not see “Add to Favorites” and other IE tell-tales.
Interestingly I’m thinking of combining a couple of aggregators as a way of managing my needs. AlertBear is a great little windows only RSS reader that sits in my system tray and pops up whenever a new post appears in it’s feeds. I’m going to use it for the select few feeds I like to monitor closely. I’m not sure if they’ll be the low traffic personal interest blogs, or the high traffic professional interest news. As long as I don’t mix the two it should work well.
Professional news for me is time sensitive and fairly large. But if I don’t get it immediately I’ll hear about it from another source. So it’s a bit like having a 24 hour news channel on. It doesn’t matter if I miss something as I’ll hear about it if it’s important.
Personal news often gets buried in that high volume noise. My favourite bloggers post no more than once per day. So as long as I get their updates I’m happy. I hate it when I’ve missed three of Sim‘s posts because I thought he was away. So those sorts of feeds will not be put in the same client as the professional feeds. Client site feeds are similarly very important. I hate it when a client asks “have you read my latest post?” and it turns out I’ve missed the latest update.
By separating the feeds into different tools I’ll track them better.
Venus Pools Cliff Jumping photo by Gary Christenson Kihei, HI, United States http://www.garyachristenson.com/
2 responses to The perfect RSS reader aggregator
I’m still using Feeddemon and am very happy with it.
It is 100% tied to Windows (so no Linux version ever likely), but there is integration/synchronisation with Newsgator’s services, so you could combine it with a web account and view both online (via Linux) and in Windows. I don’t use their online services myself – just the RSS reader.
It does utilise IE as the rendering engine … but I remember there being instructions available in the past for changing the rendering engine to Firefox. Not sure if that still works.
It’s not free – but it’s not expensive.
The perfect RSS reader aggregator
Well at last I’m on an iBook G4. A beautiful piece of kit, but my RSS longing is still not fixed. And FeedDemon won’t help there.
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