The feature that I want to talk about today is the reader’s feed discovery service. This works pretty much the same way that Google Reader provides users with recommendations.

For that you need to click on Tools > Find more feeds in the program interface to launch the Import option. The Import Feeds matching the following topics option is already preselected in the Import dialog. All you need to do know is to enter a topic to find feeds related to that.

You may also want to check the Only Feeds that match my Language option to find only English feeds and non foreign language ones.

Click Next and wait until the results have been populated by the application. This takes a few seconds. Feeds that you have already subscribed to are hidden by default. Each feed is only listed with its name which makes the selection process less straightforward than that of Google Reader (the Google product displays title, description, url, weekly post averages and subscribers on the results page).

You can select one of the suggested elements and click on the Preview button to get a feed preview. This is an important step to avoid adding feeds that are not providing useful information.

The search for Firefox revealed some great sites, like mine for instance, Mozilla Blog or Tweaking with Vishal, but also a lot of sites that most users interested in the topic won’t find useful, like the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox RSS feed or the Toolbar Cleaner feed. I’m not entirely sure why my site and Vishal’s appeared in the search results as I’m subscribed to both in RSS Owl.

Dupes may appear if a site uses multiple RSS feed links, for instance a direct feed link and one hosted by a feed provider such as Feedburner.

I tested the feed discovery service with other keywords, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Windows 8 and always came up with a few gems that I did not know about or did not subscribe to. Especially the multi-word discovery works excellent and provides excellent results.

You can download RSS Owl from the developer website.

RSSOwl was suggested as a viable alternative in the Feeddemon review here at Ghacks. It is a desktop RSS feed reader that is compatible with Linux, Windows and Apple Macintosh computer systems unlike Feeddemon which is only available for the Windows operating system.

RSSOwl can import an existing feed list in opml format which should make the transition from one feed reader to another very smooth. One thing that becomes obvious after importing a feed list is that the program feels more responsive than Feeddemon. Importing opml files is however not the only option to add feeds to the program. It is possible to add single feeds that have been copied from a website. A very interesting option is the addition of feed items by keywords that are entered by the user.

To do that the user would enter a keyword or phrase into a form provided by RSSOwl. The program displays suggestions which can but do not have to be used. It is then possible to select a source that should be searched for news items containing that keyword. Sources include Technorati, Flickr, Google News, Digg or Twitter. These news items are then displayed just like any feed in the program making it a very comfortable option of keeping up with news about a specific keyword.

The main interface of the program displays the feeds in a format known from email programs. The left sidebar contains the feed folders and feeds, the top right window the feed entries of the selected folder or feed and the lower right window the selected feed of that list. The overview that this interface provides is excellent and better than that provided by Feeddemon. There are several reasons for that.

Feeddemon offers three displays modes: A full article view that displays the full article, a summaries view that displays the first lines of an article and the article title and the compact view that displays the article titles. RSSOwl displays the feeds in a table that contains columns like the post title, author, date plus additional filters like attachments, link or status. This makes it for instance very easy to sort the articles by author to read the articles by the favorite authors first.

Feed items can also be grouped easily either by author, date, category, title and other which includes additional grouping options like ratings, state, label or feed.

The search option works similar to the search in desktop email clients. The user can search titles, all RSS items, authors, attachments or sources with the results being displayed instantly in the program. Only the selected folder or RSS feed will be searched by default making this search very powerful. The search for Linux in the Ghacks feed for instance returned the following feed items.

The grouping feature works in combination with the search making this a very powerful way of displaying feeds exactly like the user wants them to appear. Searches can be stored and displayed like any other feed or feed folder making it similar to the keyword option in Feeddemon. It is for instance possible to save a search displaying all news that contain the term software in the title.

Other features offered by RSSOwl include:

• Feed Sharing: RSSOwl knows about a number of communities like Delicious and Technorati to share your feeds and news entries with.
• Embedded Browser: Use the embedded Browser to open the full content of a news entry from the originating web site. You can open as many browser tabs as you like and open any web site from the address field.
• Labels: Use Labels to associate keywords with news entries. You can assign any number of labels and create new ones. Each Label has its own color to make it easy to distinguish labeled news from others.
• News Filters: News Filters are likely the most powerful feature in RSSOwl. They allow to automate common actions like moving or copying a news into a news bin. You can create as many filters as you need. Each filter is made up of search conditions to match specific news and a list of actions to perform on them. Once created, the filter will work on downloaded news that match the search conditions. A filter can be executed on existing news as well. Use this feature if you want to update lots of news at once
• Clean Up Wizard: With the help of the Clean-Up Wizard you can easily get rid of old news entries or feeds that have not updated in a while. Housekeeping made easy!
• Notifier: The Notifier is a small popup that displays the headlines of incoming news even when RSSOwl is minimized. You can mark news entries as sticky from the Notifier to remember reading the full content of the entry at a later time.
• Progress Windows: The Downloads and Activity dialog shows what RSSOwl is busy doing. Downloads (e.g. for Podcasts) are showing up as well as the progress of updating your feeds.
• Protected Feeds: Using feeds that are protected by username and password? No problem, RSSOwl supports BASIC, DIGEST and NTLM authentication schemes. Since RSSOwl is storing usernames and passwords for protected feeds, you should consider some extra protection by setting up a master password.
• Add-ons: You can easily install additional features into RSSOwl by using the integrated Add-on wizard. For example, the Newsgroup Reader makes it possible to read newsgroups in RSSOwl like feeds.

The features that are provided by RSSOwl are comprehensive making it an excellent desktop RSS feed reader. The sorting and grouping options coupled together with feed exploration, extensive keyboard shortcuts configuration and customization make RSSOwl my new desktop feed reader of choice. Hello RSSOwl, goodbye Feeddemon.

RSSOwl is available as a portable version and installer for Windows, Linux and Mac.

For Linux there are plenty of possible RSS feed readers. One of my favorite readers is Liferea. Liferea is a feed aggregator for Gtk/GNOME that is fast, stable, works with most feeds, and takes up very few precious CPU cycles. And Liferea offers numerous features other, simpler, RSS feed readers do not have. In this article you will be introduced to this outstanding aggregator tool for the Linux desktop.

Features

Liferea offers the following features:

• Easy subscription addition/management.
• Bookmark using sites like Zurpy.
• Fast.
• Easy to use email-like thread pane.
• Import/Export of feeds.
• Script manager.
• Subscribe to your Google mail feed.
• and much more!

Installation

Liferea is very simple to install on any modern Linux distribution. In Ubuntu 9.10 you can open up the Software Center, do a search for “liferea” (no quotes), and install. The same steps can be followed with Synaptic. If you are using a Fedora-like distribution you can open up a terminal and issue the command (as the root user):

yum install liferea

Once installed you will find the Liferea menu entry in your Internet sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Using Liferea

Figure 1

When you first fire up Liferea (see Figure 1) you will notice a number of already configured feeds for your enjoyment. Reading an entry from one of the pre-configured feeds is simple:

1. Click on the feed from the right pane.
2. Click on a story in the upper right pane.
3. Read the story in the lower right pane.

If, within the story, there is a link or comments you want to read you only need click on the Comments link or the url link within the article. The nice thing about Liferea is that you can read the entire story from within the application, so no other application is necessary. You are not just given a snippet of the article to preview.

Adding a new feed source

Of course you will most likely want add your own feed sources. Liferea has made this simple as well. Follow these steps:

Figure 2

1. Click the “New Subscriptions” button.
2. Enter the address of the source in the resulting new window (see Figure 2).
3. Click OK

That’s it. Now you will have noticed the Advanced button in the New Subscription window. You will want to go to the advanced configuration options if you need to:

• Change the source type from URL to either Command or Local file.
• Use a proxy.
• Use a conversion filter.

Other than that, just entering the source address is all you need.

Google

As I mentioned earlier, you can also subscribe to your Google mail. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click the New Subscription button.
2. Enter https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom as the source.
3. Click OK.

When prompted enter your Google username/password. Once authenticated Liferea will download your Gmail as a feed.

If you want to add your Google Reader feeds you can do this as well. Follow these steps:

1. Right click an empty spot in the left pane and select New.
2. From the resulting menu select “New Source”.
3. From the Source Selection window choose Google Reader.
4. Click OK.
5. When prompted enter your Google account username and password.
6. Click OK.

The Google feed will automatically update for you, but might take a bit of time to update depending upon how many feeds you are subscribed to with Google Reader.

Final thoughts

Liferea is one of the best RSS solutions available for the Linux desktop. Not only is it easy to use, it’s flexible enough to satisfy even the more critical users.

FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 comes with several interesting new features and also one drawback which will be addressed later on. The short setup wizard will be started even if an older FeedDemon version is installed on the computer system. This might confuse users as it could seem that all feeds that have been added to that version have been lost during the upgrade. This is however not the case. The old feeds will be integrated into the new version. This takes some time as the feed items are imported and the databases checked.

The first thing that springs to mind is the new interface that looks friendly to the eye. The RSS feeds are still listed in the left sidebar and the contents in the main right window. A new addition is a small advertising window at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the drawback that I mentioned earlier on in the article. The advertisement is not really that obtrusive but could irritate or annoy some of the users.

A lot of new features have been added to this version of FeedDemon including tagging support for items which can be synchronized with Newsgator and displayed in various ways including a tag cloud at the Subscriptions Homepage. Multiple new features have been added for Twitter users like subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines, balloon popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, automatic hyperlinking of information in Twitter feeds, the ability to send links to Twitter and even a Twitter search engine.

That’s a lot of additions for Twitter users but that’s only a tiny fraction of all the new features of FeedDemon. Users can now import Google Reader subscriptions directly but still no Google Reader synchronization. This feature is planned and it might be released in upcoming versions of FeedDemon 3.

Performance has been improved quite a bit especially when searching subscriptions or browsing popular topics. There are two interesting – and new – export options available. The first will export feeds in newspaper format into an external html document. Excellent for sending someone else a compilation of interesting feeds in that format. The second is to export the top feeds only.

Interested users can take a look at the full changelog of FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 here. This is also the location from where the RSS reader can be downloaded to the local computer system.

FeedDemon was a RSS news reader that many people seemed to recommend. Rarst was one of them and he made me take a closer look at the software. The RSS news feeds were exported to OPML format in Newzie so that I could import them in the reader if OPML import was supported.

FeedDemon is the Windows software of the Newsgator family of products. There are also clients for Macs, mobile devices and even an online reader (that is synced with the local feed reader) for those who want to use both an offline and online product.

It was possible to import the opml feed into FeedDemon. The program began to update the feeds immediately. The first thing that users will notice is the speed of the program. It is very responsive and does not produce slowdowns even when updating feeds.

Feeds can be sorted and displayed in numerous ways. It is for example possible to display only the titles of the latest feeds, or to display summaries or full posts if that is desired. Next to each title are information about the data and site that published the news and options to mark it read, flag or delete it, to send it to someone, add it to clippings or see who is linking to the article.

A click on the title can open the url in the default browser. This has to be changed in the options as the default display mode is in FeedDemon itself. Keyboard shortcuts such as [CTRK M] which marks all posts on the active page read speed up the work further.

All elements of the feed reader have been streamlined to be fast and efficient. Here are just a few examples of features that make FeedDemon an excellent feed reader:

• Caching: Download contents for offline reading
• Panic Button: The Panic button can be used to mark older feeds as read if you are really lagging behind.
• Reports: Will display feeds with errors, most popular feeds, popular topics (by analysing similar topics in the subscriptions or by using the online account), feeds that have not been updated for a while.

FeedDemon is the most responsive feed reader that I have worked with (and I had my share of offline and online RSS readers). It is fast, offers options to sort the feeds after my liking and integrates nicely with the default web browser.

A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long time users of Google Reader will need a few minutes before they grow accustomed to the changes. Many would call them drastic and some might say that it is to minimalistic.

At its ore lies a CSS file that can be used to customize the display further to suit individual needs. The main advantage of this userscript is that it puts the focus on the feed items by removing unnecessary buttons and items in Google Reader.

Helvetireader is a project in development. Interested users can follow the development process on the project’s homepage or on Twitter.

FeedDemon is the most popular program due to the whole set of services Newsgator has created for connecting feeds and devices. NewsGator Online is the web-based service which provides a central repositry for your feeds which can then be synced to various PCs, Outlook, Mobiles, iPhones and Macs.

Nick Bradbury has just released beta 1 of FeedDemon 2.8 which the object of simplifying the interface and improving social and sharing features:

Looking back at early versions of FeedDemon, it’s obvious that I was raised in the Microsoft Office school of user-interface design.  Namely, fill your application with toolbuttons, the majority of which most people will never use

What on Earth was I thinking?  There were so many toolbuttons showing that I had to stack toolbars on top of each other to fit them all.  At the time I thought I was giving customers the features they wanted, but what I was really doing was scaring people away by overwhelming them with far too many choices.

Each version since then has been an exercise in killing toolbuttons.

…

Each article in a FeedDemon newspaper has a series of icons beneath it, and over time the number of icons has grown to the point that they’ve become a serious distraction.  For example, with the addition of the sharing and tagging icons in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8, each article would have 10 icons beneath it.

Most customers use only a few of these icons, so I’ve removed most them by default in FeedDemon 2.8.”

…

The reason so many people miss FeedDemon’s sharing feature isn’t due to “user error,” of course, but because I made it too geeky and too hard to find.  In order to share an article in the current version of FeedDemon, you have to copy it to a “clippings folder” that has an RSS feed – and as you can see, it’s far from obvious how to do this:

1. Create a clippings folder
2. Choose to share it as an RSS feed
3. Click an obscure icon under the article’s headline to display a menu of clippings folders
4. Choose the clippings folder you want to copy the article to

Not exactly the simplest approach, huh?

So I decided to rectify this in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 by adding a single, obvious “Share” link – which is how I should’ve done it in the first place.

Aside from these changes there is also some bug fixes. The 2nd beta now out and the second is coming soon.

The only way to enable alphabetically sorting again was to create new folders and add the feeds to them. New folders sort the items alphabetically by default.

A comment by Fernando mentioned that Google added a new Options links beneath the feed list next to Manage Subscriptions in Google Reader that makes it possible to select the default method of sorting the feeds. The option can be set to “alphabetical” or “my order”. Selecting alphabetical will sort all feeds alphabetical again. One interesting aspect of the choice is that users who choose alphabetical will not be able to move feeds around in the same folder in Google Reader. It is still possible to move them to another folder though.

If alphabetical has been selected as the default sorting option then the feed items will stay alphabetical in their folder and new items will automatically assume the correct alphabetical position in the folder that they are moved into.

This finally gives everyone who was frantically looking for a way to enable alphabetical sorting in Google Reader a way to enable it again.

After setting up an account at Feed Journal you can start adding the RSS feeds that should be included in your personalized newspaper. A maximum number of eight articles per RSS feed can be included in each newspaper that you create. Rather unfortunate is the fact that only the eight latest articles are displayed which means that you can’t create a newspaper with all the interesting articles of the last week because those are not available anymore.

You could however print one daily to cover all articles. Users can change some settings of the newspaper at account setup, namely the format of the newspaper which is by default A4, the number of columns and the margin.

The results are pretty nice but I’m missing some options that would enhance the usability. First, I would like to see a way to add a number of feeds at once. You can only add one feed at a time currently which is not that user friendly if you want to add ten or even fifty feeds. A way to import feeds from an opml would be welcome.

The second option that I would like to see is to be able to pick more articles from a website. The current limit of eight articles does not even come close the the daily amount of articles published at sites like Techcrunch or Lifehacker.

Feed Journal offers a unique promising idea. Blog owners can offer their readers a personalized newspaper, the basic account is free which has however several limits.

Adding feeds is really simple. You can either drag and drop feeds right from the internet or add feeds manually by supplying the RSS and Atom url or OPML file. I was not able to find out how to add submenus manually but this can be done by exporting your feeds into an OPML file and adding that file to Taskable. The structure will remain.

source: cybernetnews