RSS readers: both for full content and for excerpt-only
It’s been six months since I last wrote about revisiting RSS reader choices. I decided to do a little housekeeping on my computer, and ended up switching to Feedreader.
I’ve been using GreatNews as my RSS reader, but have been disappointed that multi-selection is still not available. This means that a lot of articles have been building up, and I have to delete them one-by-one.
As I was posting an entry to a forum using Thunderbird, it occurred to me that Thunderbird actually supports RSS feeds, too. It works a lot differently from GreatNews (and RSS Bandit) though.
- Most RSS readers receive and show just the feed content, so it’s faster to not be distracted by extraneous information (e.g. ads and other links).
- Some feeds — particularly magazines such as Business Week and Forbes, newspapers such as the Globe and Mail and International Herald Tribune and password-protected site such as Yahoo Groups — are “excerpt-only“.
- In Greatnews and RSS Bandit, this means one click to load the feed, and then a second click to load the web page.
However, Thunderbird reads the link, and then loads the original web page in one step. This is clearly an improvement in productivity. However, for password-protected feeds, Thunderbird won’t manager the logins.
After looking over the alternatives again, I’m now moving to Feedreader. Although I didn’t originally like the simpler look of the user interface, Feedreader does allow me to delete batches of entries (i.e. shift-select). In addition, I discovered that there’s an “open an article link automatically” option, that produces the same result as the Thunderbird feel. This reduces the effort to one click.
Finally, in comparison to the other products, there been a few more releases over the past few months, so the product continues to evolve.
Fortunately, all of these products now support import and export of OPML, so I don’t have to re-enter all of the feeds by hand. Yes. there’s some amount of customization involved, but I’m now have hundreds of feeds … so less work is better.
Hi David, which reader are you using on your Palm handheld?
Having spent a few hours looking for a functional Windows Mobile 5 reader, I’ve settled on pRSSreader (http://pda.jasnapaka.com/prssr).
pRSSreader supports OPML (very important), along with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92 and 2.0, RDF 1.0 and Atom 0.3.
Simon, I use Plucker as the reader on my Palm, and Sunrise XP as the Windows-based program that prepares documents for Hotsync to the Palm.
It’s really Sunrise XP that does all of the work in converting the feeds to documents with links. Within the last month, the author has decided that Sunrise XP is at end of life, and won’t be maintaining the software. (He’s actually doing development work on the Sony eBook).
If you’re looking for an offline reader, the Sunrise XP page points to Vade-Mecum for PocketPC.
On my Palm, I also have AvantGo installed, but the amount of data it maintains is relatively low (until you start paying fees).
On the Plucker desktop on my PC, I also have a link to MobileRSS, which could be a contender, except I’m so satisfied with Sunrise XP.
Why even bother deleting with FeedReader? I set up my options to hide whatever is already read (out of sight, out of mind), and reduced the default archive size to 500, so things auto-delete after a very short while.