Other additions and new features of FeedDemon 3 include a redesigned user interface, enhanced Twitter feed reading and replying, automatic hyperlinking, article sharing, performance improvements and tagging. The changelog lists dozens, if not hundreds of additional changes and additions to the RSS feed reader.

The interface of FeedDemon is divided into several levels. You got the header area with tools and options, the left sidebar with subscriptions, tags, watches and clippings, the main area that displays popular items on the start page, feed titles, excerpts or full articles once a feed or category has been selected.

Feed Demon can import feeds from various sources. It can import from an opml file or from external sources like Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit or Windows Common Feed List directly.

Windows users who are looking for an RSS feed reader for their operating system should definitely give FeedDemon 3 a try. The download is provided at the developer’s website. It is compatible with Windows XP or later.

Related posts

• RSS Reader FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 (4)
• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• RSS Bandit is a Fail. (10)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• Desktop RSS Reader RSS Xpress (6)

An account is required to setup the RSS feed ticker at Rollgator. Only a few information including an email address, username, password and at least one RSS feed url need to be entered before the RSS ticker will be created. Additional RSS feeds can be added to combine multiple feeds in the ticker. Various templates are available to change the design and appearance of the ticker. Click here to check out a basic ticker that has been created using the Ghacks feed.

It is possible to add a banner text at the bottom of the screen which can contain custom text. Businesses and organizations would probably add their company’s name there. There is enough space to add additional text that could include contact information.

Rollgator is a relative new services that has been made public yesterday. The developers plan to extend the service by adding possibilities to add video and image feeds, customizable templates, clock and news on the banner or iCalendar ICS aggregation.

Related posts

• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)
• Monitor Your RSS Feed With CopyGator (2)
• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• Feed Roller Is A Lightweight Twitter And RSS Feed Ticker (12)
• Desktop RSS Reader Newzie (17)

The lightweight software program has been designed with lots of comfortable options to configure news sources and control the ticker on top of the screen. Several hotkeys are provided to pause (pause key) or disable (F11) the ticker. Other useful hotkeys are F8 to open the options, F12 to manage the feeds and Print Screen to visit the website of the current news item.

RSS Feeds can be added manually by pasting a single url into the feed manager. Multiple feeds can be imported from an opml file that most RSS feed readers can import and export feeds to. Only the user’s Twitter account can be added to the program as it is required to enter a username and password to display the Twitter messages. A lot of options are provided by the software that change the appearance of the feeds in the ticker. This ranges from transparency effects to fonts and the speed of the animation.

Feed Roller proves to be an interesting alternative for users who want to view news feeds without having to access another program to do so. The application uses less than 10 Megabytes of computer memory, is supplied as a portable version or installer and is compatible with most Microsoft operating systems.

Related posts

• Monitor Folders By RSS (8)
• Youtube Video Search Is A Barebone Youtube Downloader (2)
• Xkcd Comic Wallpaper Changer (2)
• Wireless Networking Software Homedale (13)
• Windows XP: Default Internet Browser Per User Profile (0)

The bad news is that it might not work with all Wordpress blogs and that the user who wants to exclude the categories needs to know their category ID. The first problem is easier to solve. Excluding categories from Wordpress feeds works if the Wordpress blog is not using the Feedburner feed redirection plugin or a comparable plugin. The feed redirection plugin redirects all feed requests (no matter if they are category specific or the full feed) to an RSS service like Feedburner. This prevents that users can create individual feeds based on categories, authors or tags. It also prevents the exclusion of categories in the feed.

Finding out the category IDs of a Wordpress blog is the second obstacle. Most webmasters use pretty permalinks which do not display IDs on the website. The only way to find out without asking the website owner is trial and error. Is is possible to open categories with their IDs in Wordpress even if the Pretty Permalinks option is enabled. To open a category with a category ID one would open the following url in a web browser:

http://www.ghacks.net/index.php?cat=23

This would open the Linux category here at Ghacks. This can be a very time consuming process as I have seen categories with five digits. So its probably best to ask the administrator about the category IDs. (Feel free to post additional solutions in the comments).

To exclude categories from RSS feeds in Wordpress one would use the following syntax:

http://www.ghacks.net/feed/?cat=-23

This removes category 23 from the main feed of the website. It is possible to exclude multiple categories from the feed, simply append an & and another cat=-xx in the end:

http://www.ghacks.net/feed/?cat=-23&cat=-9592

This excludes the Linux and Mac categories from the RSS feed.

Related posts

• Wordpress SEO: Advanced Nofollow (3)
• Wordpress Hack: Change Number Of Comments Per Page In Admin Interface (4)
• Wordpress Blogs: Create Custom Tag Pages (5)
• We passed the 10000 RSS Subscribers Mark (16)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)

FeedStitch offers multiple third-party ways of logging into the service including using Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Open ID and AOL. Once logged in it is possible to paste RSS feed urls into the form to add them into groups. Groups are made up of multiple RSS news feeds and other news sources and provide access to a single RSS news feed url or Json item.

The other news sources that can be added in addition to news feeds are Twitter (either by username or Twitter search), Flickr, Delicious, Github and Tumblr. A new url is created for each new group that gets created by the user. Each group can be accessed directly in the web browser or in a feed reader. It is also possible to customize the url in the form http://feedstitch.com/groupname/.

FeedStitch is a nice service for users who want to quickly combine multiple RSS feeds into one especially if they have an account at one of the services that can be used to log into FeedStitch.

Related posts

• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Google Reader News Aggregator (0)
• Forward Email To RSS (14)
• FeedDemon 3 Released (1)

One of the better scripts to display cached RSS feeds in a website is SimplePie. It might look a bit intimidating at first glance as it provides lots of options to customize the display. It is however very easy to display a feed with just a few lines of code. Start by downloading SimplePie from the website. Extract it to the computer system and upload it to the root folder of the website. You should also create a directory called cache in that root folder and make it writeable (chmod to 777).

Now add the following two lines to the top of the php file where you want to display the feed in. The first line defines the location of the simplepie.inc file on the web server (which is in the simplepie directory in root), the second the feed that you want to display on the website.

<?php
include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/simplepie/simplepie.inc';
$feed = new SimplePie('http://feedproxy.google.com/Ghacksnet');
?>

Now place the following code in the location on the website where the feed should be displayed. This will fetch the five newest feed items and display them in the selected location.

<ul>
<?php foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 5) as $item): ?>
<li>
<a href="<?php print $item->get_permalink(); ?>">
<?php print $item->get_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

And that’s it. SimplePie offers a wealth of additional functions and settings to display more than one feed or mix feeds. The default caching time is 60 minutes.

Related posts

• Web Development: PHP – what role does it fill (1)
• PHP – what it does and what it doesn’t (4)
• Web development roundup (1)
• Scriptastique web development roundup (4)
• Publish RSS News Feeds On Twitter (6)

The search results window is also not the usual top x results. Feedmil (via Make Use Of) provides access to filters, classifications and more sliders. The filters and sliders can be used to finetune the results list while the classifications give an excellent overview of post frequencies, popularity, authority and activity of each of the listed blogs.

The filters can be used to filter by feed type or language and to sort order. Several different feed types can be selected including blog feeds, podcasts, videocasts and microblog feeds. Languages should be self explanatory while the sort order can be changed from Fedmil rank to quality or relevance instead.

The sliders on the right side make it possible to finetune the topic significance to lay more or less weight on specific related terms. Each blog that is listed in the search results is also described by a list of tags.

The idea is definitely interesting. The main problem currently is that the service does not offer a large index of blogs in its database. Site owners can submit their blogs to the search engine to have it included in the search.

Related posts

• Publish RSS News Feeds On Twitter (6)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• Feed Analysis (13)
• Combine RSS News With FeedStitch (5)

So how does Folder RSS work? A click on folder-rss.exe will explain the command line basics. It basically involves launching the same executable with a series of parameters that define what to watch and how to watch it. The basic command is folder-rss.exe [parameters] [folder to watch] [output file path]. The command folder-rss.exe c:\downloads c:\downloads.xml would create an RSS feed containing the latest changes to the c:\downloads directory. The RSS feed would be accessible by loading downloads.xml (or file://localhost/C:\download.xml)

Folder RSS comes with a set of optional parameters that can be used as filters. It is possible to to configure settings to monitor only files, folders or a specific file extension. It can also be used to change the maximum age of the files, the maximum amount of files that get displayed and to include Read only, Hidden or System files.

The RSS feed is not automatically updating itself. It has to be executed to update it. This can be done with a simple batch script that the user clicks on or that gets added to a task scheduler.

Related posts

• Trout Is A Lightweight Free Music Player (2)
• Sort Files Folders Automatically (1)
• Pick Me Selects Random Files From Directories (5)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• Panic Button (5)

Bloggers can use the information generated by CopyGator to find out which blogs are publishing articles based on their work without having to perform manual searches on Google or blog search engines like Technorati.

CopyGator provides a few ways of submitting a new RSS feed to the service. Webmasters can add their RSS feed url manually, add the site to the list of sites that get pinged whenever a new blog post is published or add a badge to their website that points to the CopyGator service.

It takes a while before the feed will be processed by the service. Webmasters who want to know if and how their posts are quoted or republished find in CopyGator the means to do so effectively.

Related posts

• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)
• Forward Email To RSS (14)
• Filtering News By Keyword (2)
• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• Display RSS Feeds On Computer Monitors, Flat Screen TVs or Walls (3)

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.

Related posts

• RSS Reader FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 (4)
• Desktop RSS Reader GreatNews (9)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• FeedDemon 3 Released (1)
• Desktop RSS Reader Newzie (17)

Usage is pretty simple. The basic rule is to simply append /feed/ to the url to access the RSS feed of the category, tag or author. To give you an example. Jack started posting about Linux today at Ghacks. If you wanted to subscribe to his Linux articles you could do it the following ways:

Subscribe to the Linux category, tag or the author.

This method is not unique to Ghacks. It is the native way how Wordpress handles feeds. You can use it on any standalone Wordpress blog as long as they are not catching all feed requests and sending them to a feed processor like Feedburner. (I disabled the feed fetcher plugin to make the custom feeds work)

Related posts

• Combine RSS News With FeedStitch (5)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Netvibes Feed Problem (0)
• Monitor Your RSS Feed With CopyGator (2)
• Google Reader News Aggregator (0)

One prime example where keyword filtering can be useful is a website that several authors write for. If you are only interested in one author you could use the author’s name as the keyword so that only the author’s stories land in your RSS reader.

Notify.me has been mentioned on nearly every tech blog out there in the past weeks. It is basically a keyword filtering service that monitors RSS news feeds and informs the user of posts that match the selected keywords.

It is a bit different from services like Yahoo Pipes because it can send those notifications only to an email client, cell phone or instant messenger. The process can be divided into the following steps:

• Configuring a destination (cell phone, email, instant messenger)
• Adding a source
• Configuring keyword filters

It is not really complicated but the user needs to know about RSS feeds. The keyword filter can be set to either include or exclude posts that match keywords. Setting up no keyword filters sends all new items to the selected destination. An include keyword filter will only send the items containing the keyword while an exclude keyword will send all except those that are excluded.

The keyword filtering is still a bit rudimentary. There is no option to filter parameters like title, tags or authors which is definitely a much needed option.

Another thing that is missing is the ability to configure multiple destinations of the same type. Only one account of each type can be configured. This basically means that it is not possible to setup multiple email addresses in one account.

I cannot really see the need for such a service right now. What’s your take on this?

Related posts

• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Forward Email To RSS (14)
• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)
• Monitor Your RSS Feed With CopyGator (2)
• Get Notified If Other Websites Use Your Articles (6)

I usually fired up Google Reader and kept it open all the time to read new RSS feeds. The problem with that approach was that this meant that I was always logged into my Google account. The Google account was used for other Google services as well. Having read about Gmail and Google vulnerabilities before I decided that it would be best to move from Google Reader to another client to prevent that the account data would fall into the wrong hands. Yes, the likelihood was not very high but the chance existed.

Newzie was one of the first RSS readers that I evaluated and I immediately liked it. It was easy to import the opml file from Google Reader into Newzie so that all of the subscribed feeds would be available in the new RSS reader as well.

The default display mode of this RSS reader is to sort feeds by the time they were last updated with the most recently updated feeds at the top of the list. This view can be changed to a folder mode that simply lists all feeds alphabetically in their folders. The order of the feeds can be changed and the visibility of the complete menu can be toggled to increase screen size for the actual news items.

The RSS feeds are displayed in their own browser-like interface. A click on a title or link will load that link in a new tab in the Newzie interface. This is actually one of my complaints that I have with the RSS reader. I would have preferred that links would open in the default browser instead but I guess many users will think that reading them right in the RSS reader might be the more comfortable way. There is actually an option to load the link externally but it is hidden in a submenu.

The main interface provides access to three view modes:

Report View: Will only display new feed items filling out the complete interface
List View: Will divide the main interface into an upper panel that is displaying the RSS items and a lower panel that is displaying the contents of the active item.
List View 2: Like the first Live View only that the contents are divided vertically and that the RSS items are sorted by date

All posts can be marked read, deleted, flagged or copied / moved.

One interesting feature of Newzie is the ability to look at the news items of a particular feed by hovering the mouse over the feed. This makes it possible to quickly look at new items that have been posted without having to actually load the feed.

New items can be filtered right from the main interface using so called on-the-fly filtering. Commands like title=name would list all posts with name being part of their titles. Other filters make it possible to view only posts that have been updated before, at or after a certain period in time, posts that have been posted in a specific folder or posts that have a certain priority associated with them.

There is also a second interesting option which makes it possible to create so called virtual channels which apply word filters to RSS feeds. It would be possible to create a virtual channel that would contain all posts that would contain “portable software” in the body. It is currently only possible to apply those filters to the title, body or all of the news item. These filters can be combined by using AND or OR relations. It would be nice to see support for other information like author or tags added to the filter in the future.

Newzie offers another interesting related feature. It can monitor websites even if they do not offer an RSS feed. It can monitor any website for any kind of changes or specific changes. Specific changes can be words, text segments, links or images. Those monitored websites would then be added to the same menu containing the RSS feeds.

Other features Newzie is offering:

• Statistics
• Newsticker
• Monitoring IE favorites
• Feed priorities

A few more options to customize the RSS reader would be helpful. This would include the option to load links in the default web browser by default, an option to always display only the titles of the items in the overview and the ability to filter additional variables like author or tags.

Related posts

• RSS Reader FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 (4)
• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• Desktop RSS Reader GreatNews (9)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• Monitor Folders By RSS (8)

A user of Feedrinse may add up to 500 feeds to the service and group those feeds in different channels. He can do so by adding them manually in a web form or importing a opml file that contains a list of feeds. The filters can then be configured for feeds individually or for every channel.

The filter options can be used to allow or disallow feed items that do or do not contain specified posts, titles, bodies, tags or authors with a certain string. It could for instance be set to only include feed items that have been written by a specific author or that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

A new RSS feed link will be created that contains only those items that have passed the filter. Users who need more options to filter and customize feeds should take a look at Yahoo Pipes instead.

Related posts

• Combine RSS News With FeedStitch (5)
• Forward Email To RSS (14)
• Filtering News By Keyword (2)
• We passed the 10000 RSS Subscribers Mark (16)
• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)

These news feeds can then be subscribed to in any news reader so that the user can read incoming emails in his news reader instead of his email client. Why would someone want to do that? The only practical issue that came to mind was to publish the news feed on a website so that multiple users would have access to the email. It could also be interesting for situations where multiple users need read access to email accounts but that’s configurable in mail clients as well.

There is not really a reason to use this service independently, at least none that we could think of while reviewing it. Many users will (rightfully) dislike the fact that they have to enter the data of their email account on the website to enable the service. Another aspect is that the latest news entry on the company’s blog dates back to last year. The project feels abandoned.

Can you think of another reason why someone would want to forward email to RSS?

Related posts

• Forward RSS News To Email (8)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Filtering News By Keyword (2)
• Combine RSS News With FeedStitch (5)
• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)

Users need an Open ID to log into the service and a Twitter account to publish the RSS News Feed to. It basically works like this. The user creates a new account at Twitterfeed using an Open ID account. He can then create a new Twitter Feed to the account by supplying a Twitter account and a feed url of the feed that he wants to add. Once that has been setup Twitterfeed will publish new items on the Twitter account automatically until the user pauses or deletes it again.

The feed is not authorized which means that anyone can post any feed to Twitter which could be interesting for some users who would like to post a number of feeds to a Twitter account. A number of feeds? The number of feeds that can be published does not seem to be limited which in effect means that someone could create a new Twitter account and publish all of his favorite RSS News Feeds to it.

This could be useful if access to RSS News readers is limited or blocked in a network while access to Twitter is not. It could also be a nice service that webmasters could offer their readers. Spam could be a issue on the other hand.

Related posts

• Google Reader Automatically Translates Feeds (2)
• Discover New Feeds With FeedMil (6)
• Check For Dead RSS News Feeds (2)
• Website Information (2)
• We passed the 10000 RSS Subscribers Mark (16)

The Feed Analysis that I performed about three months ago was dead on the point though. You might remember that it offered predictions of the coming three, six and twelve months and it predicted 10000 RSS Feed Readers in less than three months.

I wanted to reach 10000 RSS Readers before the third anniversary of Ghacks which is on October 3rd and I’m quite happy that I reached all the goals that I wanted in this year early on. The next big figure that I want to reach in 12 months is 20000 RSS Feed Readers. That’s a huge number and I have to get some good coverage on popular websites to reach it.

Do you have any suggestions on how to increase the RSS Feed Reader count further? I do not want to raise it the way many make money blogs did it who gave away prices to random new feed subscribers. I want real readers who like Ghacks and join the discussion every now and then.

Related posts

• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• RSS Bandit is a Fail. (10)
• Publish RSS News Feeds On Twitter (6)
• Personalized Desktop News Feeds (4)
• OPML Support for Firefox (3)

Yes, I got excited about RSS Bandit a couple of days ago after it was released in Alpha with NewsGator and Google Reader Syncing capabilities. I have yet been able to get this to actually work and have found the program so buggy as to be unusable. It frequently crashes, spiked the CPU and cause other system instability.

It’s a non-commercial product however so I’m no going to complain too much, just wait for the next version to be released… hopefully a usable beta! A quick Google showed that other users have found it fairly unusable as well.

Download Squad:
“At least that’s the theory. In practice, we’re still waiting for our changes to show up in Google Reader. We read a few items, unsubscribed from a feed, and over an hour later Google Reader is showing no sign that it’s noticed. This is still Alpha software, so it’s possible speedier updates could come at a later date.”

NotGartner:
“Last weekend I was subscribed to over about 1000 RSS feeds and conicidentally last weekend RSSBandit also became unusable. Obviously I had reached some kind of threshold that the architecture of RSSBandit wasn’t designed to cope with.”

Problems with RSS Bandit are much more prevalent on Vista, so I hope with time this will be addressed.

Eric Denekan
“For reading RSS feeds, I use RSS Bandit and until now I was not able to use it, because even though I could install is, I could not configure it correctly or download my feeds from newsgator. The interface froze.”

These where the same issues I experienced but considering it was posted two years ago I would have thought by now it would have been fixed. Considering this post was also written around the same time and the promise has been yet to materialise.

So it looks like I will keep using FeedDemon for some time now. Unfortunately NewsGator are quite insistent that they will not be introducing any Google Reader synchronisation to FeedDemon as they feel NewsGator Online to be the faster and superior product. I think that if this is the case then surely they have nothing to worry about as consumers will be able to see which product is best themselves.

Newsgator Forums:

“We think Google Reader is pretty cool, but we probably won’t sync with it in the near term. NetNewsWire syncs with the NewsGator online reader which has a faster and friendlier new version in beta right now. Going forward, NetNewsWire will be able to sync additional data with NewsGator Online to give features that aren’t available in Google (like seeing the most popular articles recommended for you based on what others are reading).

That being said, feedback from users is important to us. If we continue to hear this request, we’ll move it up the priority list for consideration.”

Sure sure.

Related posts

• FeedDemon RSS News Reader (12)
• FeedDemon 3 Released (1)
• FeedDemon 2.8 Beta 2 (2)
• We passed the 10000 RSS Subscribers Mark (16)
• RSS Reader FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 (4)

Feedbooks is providing a similar service. The only difference is that they -only- convert the RSS Feed of a website into a pdf document that can be downloaded without costs from their website. The whole process is as simple as it can get, paste a feed into the form, hit submit and download the pdf document at the end.

Feedbook provides A4 pdf downloads, Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad (whatever that is) and custom documents. I was not able to explore the custom option further because one has to signup to create those.

Feedbooks provides a button that webmasters can embed on their website. I have not tried it yet but I guess it would be possible to use one of the many feed combination services to combine many feeds into one and paste that url into Feedbooks to create a huge pdf document from multiple feeds.

Feedbooks offers more than just this RSS to PDF service. Users can download e-books as well that can be sorted in various ways. I encountered some error messages from time to time when I tried to convert some feeds.

Related posts

• Online Book Demonstration (0)
• Wikipedia gets books and gets printed (2)
• We passed the 10000 RSS Subscribers Mark (16)
• Use Microsoft Word to save PDF Documents (7)
• Unofficial Adobe Reader Patch Released (4)

Exporting my Netvibes RSS Feeds and importing them into Brief was a breeze. Both support the OPML format which was all I needed to make the switch. Brief adds a small icon to the Firefox status bar that displays the number of unread news of all your subscribed RSS Feeds. A mouse-over will list the websites that have new news items and the amount of items on each specific site but I’m not using that feature much.

I usually just click on the icon which loads an instance of Brief in a new tab. The left pane displays all of my subscribed RSS feeds and the right pane the feeds. By default only the unread news items are displayed in the right pane but it is possible to select a specific feed or folder instead.

Feeds can be marked as read which removes them from the right pane and moves the next news article to the top. If you are in a hurry you can mark all of them read or display only the headlines of the feeds for a faster overview.

A click on the headline of the news article loads the article on its original website in a new tab and marks the feed automatically as read. A click on a link in an article however only opens the link in a new tab.

Not everything is nice and shiny though. Brief seems to load old feeds from time to time and I have not discovered the pattern when it does that. It’s irritating if articles from last year pop up as new articles. This might be a glitch and it is happening rarely but it is still annoying.

Another aspect that I’m missing is a history function. It happens that I quickly hit the mark read button only to notice that the article sounded more interesting than I thought. I have to find the site and article in the site’s listing in the left pane then. A history function or undo last x actions would be really nice.

From what I’ve experienced so far I can say that Brief cut the time I’m reading and watching RSS Feeds in half. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. Another nice effect of the switch from Netvibes to Brief is that I only need to click the RSS Feed icons to add the feed to my list of Feeds. I always had to copy and paste the url into Netvibes before.

Related posts

• Split The Firefox Browser (5)
• Sort Firefox Bookmarks (3)
• Share, bookmark and e-mail links with Shareaholic (2)
• Secure Firefox with Firekeeper (2)
• OPML Support for Firefox (3)