Fresh news from the root

I’ve been using Opera’s integrated RSS reader for a long time and it sure is a fine enhancement. But I still feel that it’s not so ultimate and it misses some things. Especially it’s interface could look a little better and have few more features. For example, in Opera you can’t display the news from all sources at once, well-arranged in a nice interface, instead you always have to click the source, read some news and then switch to the next one and so on. This is a little clumsy. However, Opera is mainly a great browser, not an RSS reader.

Short time ago I found a nice online RSS aggregator called Rootly. Important thing is that you can customize your account very well. You can use their feed presets or even better insert your own feed addresses and create unique tabs. Rootly then collects all the news for you and displays them in a very clean and well styled interface.

You can choose in which tab your news will appear and the order of tabs too. I appreciate that this service mixes all news together and displays them on one page instead of dividing the feeds according to their source. I hope that in the future they’ll add at least one more option - the possibility to choose how many news you want to display on a single page.

And the best thing at the end - Rootly supports OpenID (read previous article for more info on that). Actually, when I found the service few weeks ago, I had some serious problems with logging in using OpenID among other minor troubles but at this time it looks like everything works fine already.

Rootly is not really an alternative if you are already using Netvibes for instance as your news aggregator. I’m basically using it at work because Netvibes has been banned there while Rootly has not. The interface of Rootly is not that intuitive and it takes a step longer to perform actions. Adding feeds for instance has to be done on a separate page while you can add them on the fly so to speak in Netvibes.