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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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One of the popular reasons to connect to the Internet is to catch up on the latest news. This can be done by browsing to websites and reading the news there or by installing an RSS News Feed reader and use its interface to read the news. The advantage of the latter method is the concentration of news in one application, the notifications of new messages and reduced bandwidth costs.

The iRSS mobile phone RSS News Feeds reader is just one application that can be used to read rss news feeds on a mobile device. One advantage of it is the compatibility with lots of different devices like smartphones, mobile phones and PDAs.

The news reader can store up to five feed groups and one hundred RSS News Feeds which should be sufficient for mobile usage. It supports rss, xml, atom and rdf feeds and is compatible with RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 feeds. It also comes packed with a few popular feeds like Yahoo Technology News or Youtube Recently Added Video News.

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I figured it out by myself just a few minutes ago. Here is what I did. My Feedburner feed was being transferred from Feedburner to Google and I had to change a cname entry to reflect that change. Everyone knows that changes to the DNS can take up to 48 hours and I first thought that this was the issue.

Other webmasters on various forums reported similar problems, especially those dreaded 404 not found problem. Once the 404 went away I encountered the main problem. The feed was not showing up. When I opened it in the browser it would simply show the Ghacks homepage.

Google support told me to change the url in the Feedsmith Wordpress plugin to the new feedproxy url which I did. This did not turn out to fix the initial problem though.

I opened http://feedburner.google.com/, went to the Troubleshootize tab and tried to Resync my feed. Thought that this could be the problem. The resync basically told me that it could not find a feed and that I should check the original feed url at Feedvalidator.

I checked it there and it told me that this was not a valid RSS News Feed. The old url which was entered in Feedburner from day 1 was http://www.ghacks.net/?feed=rss2. You can check that for yourself if you click on the Edit Feed Details tab.

I changed the feed to http://www.ghacks.net/feed which turned out to be a valid feed. The last step was to enter that feed url into the Original Feed option at the Google Feedburner site. I tried to sync the feed and that worked as well. I went to Google Reader and updated my feed and wham, there were all my missing posts.

If you have a similar problem I suggest you check out if your feed in Feedburner ends with ?feed=rss2 or something similar. Check that at Feedvalidator and try other feed urls if the first comes up as no valid RSS News Feed.

Please let me know if you can access my feed properly now. I would also like to hear from other webmasters with the problem.

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That phase won’t normally last longer than 24 hours. The old feed address is automatically redirected to the new one but since I have been using feed branding at Feedburner I had to update a cname in the domain configuration to point to a new url.

I got one email so far from a user who told me that my feed was not showing up anymore and that he was receiving a 404 (not found) instead. Please let me know if you are also experiencing those difficulties. It helps if you mention the service or program that you are using to read my feed.

Update: Feed should be working now for everyone.

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