Tag: RSS Readers

I Heart Google Reader

Earlier this year I switched from NewzCrawler to SharpReader for keeping track of all of the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. The past couple weeks, though, I gave up on SharpReader as well and switched to Google’s latest version of its still-in-beta Google Reader.

I used Bloglines for a week a couple years ago and the experience was so poor that I swore off browser-based readers altogether. Google, though, gets it right.

I tend to have hundreds of feeds and 30,000-40,000 unread stories at any time in my reader. This is a huge problem for the desktop-based readers as they start to use lots of memory. SharpReader was sucking up 400mb of memory while running. And, although I haven’t used it in awhile, Bloglines apparently still has a ridiculous 200 items per feed limit, so after a feed has 200 unread items, no new items are added.

Google Reader doesn’t have that limitation, and it is very nice to offload the huge volume of feeds and items to Google’s hardware and just run the browser, not to mention the capability of accessing the reader from any web browser.

And, of course, it’s free. I’m sold.

NewzCrawler 1.7

For the past few months, I’ve been using Bloglines as an RSS reader, but it just didn’t scale very well with the huge number of feeds and news entries I was accumulating. So I decided to switch back to a Windows-based RSS reader. I had two requirements, however, which (oddly) turned out to be pretty difficult to meet:

1. It had to be able to let me subdivide the RSS feeds into multiple groupings and then automatically update those groupings (some RSS readers for Windows will only update the group you are currently viewing, which makes absolutely no sense).

2. It had to be able to store all data on an external hard drive so I could go back and forth from work without having to run some silly synchronization program.

As far as I can tell, the only decent RSS client that will do this in Windows is NewzCrawler.

Second Thoughts on Feed Demon

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.

Feed Demon

Like I said before, new RSS aggregators are coming fast and furious. Shortly after writing about BlogExpress I ran across a mention of Feed Demon. Finally, an RSS aggregator for Windows that will spit out multi-feed category views.

Feed Demon lets the user set up a category, say animal rights, and can then give a simple one page display of all new stories from just the feeds in that category. Excellent — I think I’ve found a winner here.

Feed Demon is currently in beta, and so far there’s no information on pricing, but just the ability to show a combined category page will have me shelling out whatever it takes to buy.

BlogExpress

I’ve complained several times that the current RSS aggregator I’m using — Radio Userland — doesn’t have any way to categorize the dozens of RSS feeds I’m monitoring and, unfortunately, what looks like the aggregator with the featureset I want is only available on the Macintosh.

The upside is that people seem to be developing new RSS aggregators right and left so there are plenty of ones to choose from that come close to what I want. The best I’ve come across so far for Windows is BlogExpress which has the advantage of also being free (with a donation suggested).

BlogExpress is almost perfect. It is built on top of Internet Explorer and lets me do most of what I want — I can create categories and subcategories for the various RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. It can give me a category level look at how many new items there are on each RSS feed, but alas it cannot yet aggregate all of the feeds under, say, the Africa category, and simply show me in one page all of the new stories in all of the RSS feeds I’ve tagged as being about Africa. That’s what I’m really after.

BlogExpress uses a tabbed interface much like Mozilla, so new stories I click on in the aggregator pane show up as new tabs. Works great, but I’m spoiled by Firebird’s ability to background load new tabs which I find a much better way of opening new tabs, especially when I’m going through a list of 20-30 stories I might want to open.