Friday, July 29, 2005

Current preferences for RSS readers

I've been using RSS readers for a couple of years now to try to manage the 'River of News'.

This roughly follows the order in which I explored the world of aggregators.


  • AmphetaDesk -- web-based, runs on a server somewhere, perl-based. A nice solid news aggregator. There is a patch, AmphetaOutlines that improves the look-n-feel which I used. The only downside is it only supports RSS and not ATOM. It looks like RSS is going to win, but there are some sites out there (notably google's blogspot) that only provide ATOM feeds. I've used Amphetadesk the longest so far.

  • Sage, Thunderbird and other mozilla plugins -- nice but I don't really know when it updates.

  • Liferea -- Linux desktop, gnome-based. Nice but I found it a little buggy. It likely has improved since I last looked.

  • Straw -- Linux desktop, gnome-based. A nice client side application. The downside is it is client based and sometimes I want to check news while away from the my primary laptop.

  • bloglines.com -- A no-cost, web-based service. That's what I use these days.

  • Various Portals -- Yahoo!, MSN, Google, etc. While they do support adding RSS feeds, I just don't like how they clutter it up with other random stuff and ads. Give it a try, you may like it.



My blogroll is in various formats is available here.