RSS: Web News Simplified
Posted September 29, 2006If you read blogs or news sites with any regularity, you may have found it a cumbersome process to visit each of your websites, looking for new content. It just so happens that RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication,” provides an alternative way keep up with your favorite websites without opening them all in your browser.By taking the form of nothing fancier than a simple XML file, RSS succeeds in being ultra-portable. There are countless ways to access and utilize an RSS feed — that’s the whole point. If the idea of keeping up-to-date on all your favorite websites as effortlessly as possible appeals to you, then I invite you to check out some nifty RSS tools.
Mac OS X
If you’re a Mac user such as I have recently become, you might like NetNewsWire Lite. Although this software offers only a subset of the features found in the $30, non-lite version, it is free and serves as a very comfortable RSS reader in OSX. NewsFire is another popular choice, but at $18, it still isn’t free. If free is what you want, Vienna and Shrook are reasonable choices.
Windows
NewzCrawler ($25) is highly touted as one of the best. FeedDemon ($30) is from the same people as NetNewsWire, so it’s probably good as well. If you want free, try Omea Reader; it looks to be of quality.
Linux
Lifera: Linux Feed Reader. They even link to their competition right there on the main page.
Everybody!
This is the best section of them all! These solutions can be used on any of the major Operating Systems.
- The popular Firefox web browser has the integrated ability to view RSS feeds. Simply click on the RSS icon on the right end of the address bar to add the feed to your bookmarks as a dynamic folder. (The icon will appear only on pages that have an associated RSS feed.) Also, Sage is a very handy Firefox extension that integrates a nice RSS reader.
- RSSOwl appears to be a nice multi-platform reader written in Java. (They’ve just released 1.2.2.)
- There are numerous web services such as Bloglines and FeedBucket, but my favorites are the amazing web 2.0 portal sites. I highly recommend these sites: Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Protopage. A picture of my Netvibes page is below. If you haven’t seen these sites before, prepare to be amazed.
Comment on this article with your favorite way(s) to work those RSS feeds!Update: Oh, and I meant to mention the brand spanking new RSS reader from Google. All the smoothness of Google Mail in an RSS reader!
I actually waffle between Firefox’s Live Bookmark feature (basically an RSS reader in the form of a list of bookmarks) and Pageflakes - a very handy little Web 2.0 portal site (which Adam mentions above). The benefit of both of these things is that I don’t have a third app that I need to open in order to read my feeds. Mozilla Thunderbird also has a built in feed reader, which I’m told works very wekk (I use Thunderbird, but have never actually tried out the feed reader).