In September, I extolled the virtues of RSS reader Feed Demon. Feed Demon seemed like the perfect RSS reader for me, with the ability to organize news feeds into groups, so I could my animal rights RSS feeds separate from my technology-related RSS feeds.
Unfortunately, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how Feed Demon worked and I’ve had to abandon it. Feed Demon does indeed let you organize your RSS feeds into separate groups. The problem is that it only updates feeds in groups when you actually have that group selected.
So, suppose I’m looking through the headlines of my animal rights group in the morning before I run off to a meeting halfway across the state. I leave my computer on and connected to the Internet, but when I return 8 hours later the only feeds that will have been updated are those in the animal rights group (even though all the other feeds and groups are set to update every 60 minutes).
Frankly, I thought this was a bug at first and reported it in the Feed Demon support newsgroup, but it turns out that it’s supposed to work that way. To his credit, developer Nick Bradbury replied to my report by saying that this behavior would be altered at some point, but not in the version 1.0 release.
In the meantime, I’m off looking for an RSS reader that can do grouping of channels effectively.