500 Web feed readers, and none dead on

I started out using straw for reading Web feeds. I found it a bit cumbersome in terms of death by keystroke, having to tap through each entry in each feed. I figured there had to be a better way. Narval (whatever happened to Narval, anyways?) was combining news sources into a virtual newspaper five years ago. I found something the like in Lektora. I quickly found an assortment of annoyances, and I now use a combo of Straw and Lektora. I see that Lektora still barely supports Linux (they have an October 13th release for Windows, June 7th for Mac and the same old March 18th for Linux that I downloaded earlier this year), so it's time to move on.

Parand Tony Darugar suggested Bloglines, and I had a look. In UI, it's just like Lektora, but implemented over the Web rather than as a browser extension. I think it would be perfect except that the over-the-Web functionality makes it rather slow. I've read of a lot of folks who started on Bloglines jumped for Firefox's Sage extension. I'd tried it before and found it to be just Straw in the Web browser, and when I checked again, it's still just that. I'd rather not go back to death by keystroke or mouse click. OK, to be fair, Sage is much less clicky than Straw. It's actually quite clever in how it lays out all the entries for each feed. I just wish it could do that for groups of feeds rather than individual ones.

So it looks as if I'm headed for Bloglines, but first of all I'd like to throw out a lazy-Web check for any other suggestions. I'm up for any browser-based or Linux tool. I'm willing to pay (within reason) for a really solid tool. I prefer the newspaper-like format (if you couldn't tell), where I can just group my Web feeds and then open each group together and mostly just have to scroll down to read all updated entries in that group. I have scrolled through the bewildering array in the RSS Compendium and tried some of them, but the ones I tried didn't really impress me.

Any ideas, friends? TIA.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia

8 responses

My general experiences pretty much coincide with yours. I just gave Google's Reader a bit of time - first impressions were bad bad bad, but after a giving it the benefit of the doubt actually started to like it. But it was still far from dead on, and when I got confused over my subscriptions I slipped back into using Bloglines.

An alternative you might want to consider is your own server-side setup like Chumpalogica. That's just a bit of Python with Redland, drop in a channel list done FOAFishly, hook cron and it Just Works.

In my own code-play I've done something similar using Python+Redland (didn't in the end use Chumpalogica because I wanted the MySQL-based persistence, seemed easier to start from scratch). Eventually I want to use this for my personal aggregator, but right now it's just a testbed for messing with SPARQL.

I imagine you could do something similar using 4Suite+Versa, although hopefully considerably cooler and less buggy ;-)

— Danny

An alternative you might want to consider is your own server-side setup like Chumpalogica. That's just a bit of Python with Redland, drop in a channel list done FOAFishly, hook cron and it Just Works.

In my own code-play I've done something similar using Python+Redland (didn't in the end use Chumpalogica because I wanted the MySQL-based persistence, seemed easier to start from scratch). Eventually I want to use this for my personal aggregator, but right now it's just a testbed for messing with SPARQL.

I imagine you could do something similar using 4Suite+Versa, although hopefully considerably cooler and less buggy ;-)

Just like Danny, my experiences is that all RSS readers (like all mail clients) suck. I've been a bloglines user for about a year and a half, and was mostly happy with it, but have been looking for something else for a long time. My main criteria was that it needed to be web-based, which limited my search quite a bit. I started using NewsGator Online about a week ago and I'm very happy with it. I only have a few hundred feeds, so it's managable even without grouping them in folders, although NewsGator supports folders as well. (NewsGator has an Outlook plugin, but as I don't use Windows, I've not tried it).

— Darren Chamberlain

Rojo is what you are looking for. Newspaper view of feeds that you can tag and view together. Read/Unread, Mark, Blog, etc buttons. Web-based, using nice AJAX stuff, so you can read the same set wherever. I've been hooked for five months.

— Noel

[Empty comment]

— Trackback from DonXML Demsak's All Things Techie

You can do that with Liferea, I think.

Feeds are organized in a hierarchy, and the reader can be configured to show the entries from all the feeds in an entire folder when you click the folder. Further, while it defaults to the classic three-panel view you can configure it for a two-panel view where the there's no headline list and instead the content pane shows all entries in full.

Sounds to me like that's what you want.

— Aristotle Pagaltzis

Hey Uche,

I actually started this exact project last year. I'll send you the link offline. This is just the skeleton, and its in a state of foobar at the moment. But the only piece that needs to be finished is the newspaper layout and the search engine implemented client side, something that I already have... somewhere... one of those code files that I developed for another project before client-side XSLT was seen as a viable cross-platform option and as such was all done on the server.

Anyway, I'll shoot you the link offline and with a few suggestions as to how the final product should look and function it should be simple enough to finish up with a few hours worth of coding at the very most. Would be cool to integrate this with 4Suite and Amara come to think of it... well, we can discuss how that would work offline.

I'll send you the link now.

— M. David Peterson

Wow. I love the LazyWeb.

I think the winning suggestion is Rojo. Josh Sled and Noel mentioned it to me at about the same time. I started using it today, and so far it blows me away. It not only does the mosedt things I asked for, but it does a lot more I hadn't thought to ask for. I'm really looking forward to the tag-based features. My Rojo user name is "uche", in case anyone wants to share with me on Rojo.

Aristotle, thanks for the Liferea suggestion. Funny thing is that the FAQ spooked me a bit.

http://liferea.sourceforge.net/faq.htm

I know they're just being straightforward, and I love that, but I think I'll give Rojo a try first.

Danny and Mark, I'm always up for hacking up my own tools, so let's keep in touch about such ideas. But I do also need a reliable day-to-day tool that I don't have to stress about.

— Uche