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.

GreatNews is another desktop rss reader that comes with all the features one would expect from a rss reader. It can import opml feeds which is a standard XML format that contains feed information. Basically any feed reader can export and import opml files. The first thing that observant users will notice is the low resource usage. A direct comparison between FeedDemon and GreatNews revealed that GreatNews was using between 10-20 Megabytes of computer memory less than FeedDemon did. (GreatNews uses about 3 Megabytes when minimized while FeedDemon uses more than 7 MB)

Resource usage is not everything on the other hand. Updating feeds in the rss reader seemed to be a bit faster than it was in FeedDemon as well. This might be caused by a subroutine of the desktop rss reader that automatically detects dead or feeds that have not been updated in a very long time giving the user the option to remove those feeds from the rss software. FeedDemon has a similar option as it displays feeds that are no longer working or have not been updated in a specific time as well. This is a manual process however.

One of the more interesting features of GreatNews is the so called News Watches. This makes it possible to make the desktop rss reader search for keywords automatically in previously defined rss feeds. It is for example possible to search for the name “Bill Gates” in all subscribed rss news feeds, or for the term Linux only in the Ghacks feed. This is an excellent way to find keyword related news articles faster than usual.

Other features are:

• Various styles can be selected, custom ones created. This includes styles that do not display images, flash or other multimedia contents.
• Offline reading.
• Saving news articles locally.
• Article labels to access articles faster.
• Full page reading
• Statistics
• Track Comments

Are there any disadvantages? The only thing that’s not looking bright is support for the desktop rss reader. While the software developer is still active on the website he does not seem to have plans to update the software further except for a few necessary bug fixes. This is not a problem right now as everything in the news reader is working as intended and without complications. GreatNews as of now is an excellent alternative to FeedDemon.

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.