Thursday, January 1, 2004

Trying out various RSS clients

Tonight I've been playing around with various GNU/Linux-based RSS
clients.

* liferea v0.4.5
C-based, gnome interface, Three paned interface, read in either the
pane or click to load in a browser. Over all pretty nice but
occasional hangs and some RSS that validate aren't recognised (like
mine). If would be helpful to give a clue why it wasn't accepted.
It doesn't import my amphetadesk opml file.
* rssowl v0.63b
Java-based with SWT graphics libraries so it looks more like a
modern GUI, three paned interface. No way to import opml files at
the moment, it is only alpha quality release, so that is
understandable. It comes with a nice list of RSS feeds. This app
does parse my RSS feed, but displayes the HTML markup in the reading
area.
* syndigator v0.12
perl-based with GTK/Gnome style interface. Imported my amphetadesk
opml and parsed my RSS feed. Like rssowl, sometimes it displays
HTML in the text. Hmm, perhaps it is blosxom's RSS output that needs
looking at. It still seems a bit young in in the GUI -- the
keyboard access is a bit lacking and while updating feeds is laggy.



There best of the crop so far is liferea, but I may stick with the
web-based/perl amphetadesk (with
amphetaoutline theme) for a while longer. Anyone have some
suggestions?