Feed Reader Suggestion
December 21st, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I’m at my wits end trying to find a feed reader that works for me and am looking for some suggestions.
In the beginning I used bloglines, but they delay and frequent outages made me drop them. I upgraded to sage for firefox which solved my delay problem but made saving things for later reading problematic. I recently tried Google reader (more about that soon) which solved my saving problem, but we were back to the bloody delay/latency issue again. I then switched to RSS Popper for Outook. It gave me the ability to flag for later and had no latency, however old feeds were hanging around and not dissaperaring, and the thing was painfully slow.
So here’s what I’m looking for:
- Zero Delay / Latency, it’s hard to be a bleeding edge blogger when your on a delay
- Ability to flag, save, star posts for later reading. Sometimes I just want to fly through the news make sure I’m not missing something and come back to the non time sensitive stuff later
- Old stuff has to disappear from the regular view, but let me change the settings and view them if I want to.
- It has to be fast, I have about 150 feeds in the reader and it should be able to check them all without taking too long and slowing down my computer (I have a 3.2 GHZ Pentium 4 with hyperthreading and 1 GB of Ram)
- It has to be free, I’m not paying a bloody cent for the thing
All right jumping the gun a little here actually Google reader came damn close to giving me everything, it was the damn latency issue which drove me batty. Normally I don’t recommend greasemonkey but for Google reader it’s mucho better. Check out Mihai Parparita’s Blog. He’s a Google employee who I think works on the reader but not sure, and pushes out some kick ass google-unofficial greasemonkey scripts (see Matt I can say nice things about Google).
Lastly I dropped the folks at Megite.com an OPML file and they built a custom channel for me (see mgray) which gives me my own “news channel” based on the feeds in my file and feeds in their library. Now before you go thinking yeah Gray you get all the perks cause you know you’re like a blogging superhero, put it to rest, because they do it for lots of folks and will do it for you too, just follow the instruction on the right hand side under “my megite”.
PS If anyone knows a way to hack around the latency issue let me know, I promise I want tell anyone 
Sphere It
December 21st, 2006 at 5:37 am
Hi M,
How about Thunderbird? I’ve started to use this for RSS since their version 2.0 Beta1 went live.
It’s fast and performs well I think.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:05 am
I agree with James’ comment above about Thunderbird. But, I use Thunderbird portable, not the desktop version as my feed reader. This means you can install thunderbird onto a pen drive and check your pop mail and RSS feeds anywhere where you can access a computer.
The best part is Thunderbird portable does not save any files onto the pc you are using, everything is saved onto the pen drive. Also, you can encrypt the pen drive so if it gets lost or stolen, no-one can access your mail/feeds.
Hope this Helps, G
December 21st, 2006 at 6:25 am
I find Feedreader to work well to download all posts to new posts to my desktop instead of accessing them through an online aggregator.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:35 am
Netvibes works well for me.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:39 am
Have you tried threz? http://www.threz.com
I have about 1 minute latency with my 100+ feeds, ie. articles come in every minute or so.
December 21st, 2006 at 10:31 am
NetVibes is quick. Their tabbing makes it easy to organize and follow a bunch of feeds.
December 21st, 2006 at 11:53 am
I have been searching for something good for a while and tried a ton. I found this one called Snarfer and it has made me pretty happy so far.
Might be worth a look.
December 21st, 2006 at 12:17 pm
I use Thunderbird as well (though sometimes I have problems with duplicated content in forum feeds) But I’m gonna install it on a pen drive now, as per “geek” that sounds pretty cool.
December 21st, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Speaking of feedreaders, whats with the “Partner Links” text links underneath the copyright bloglines ?
December 21st, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Been using FeedReader from the start.
http://www.feedreader.com/
Does not have a flagging option, but everything else in your list.
December 21st, 2006 at 12:50 pm
‘Greatnews’
December 21st, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Mihai does rock, and yup, his official job is on Reader, not Greasemonkey Guru. I’ll ask him about latency. A well-behaved reader shouldn’t pound websites, so I think Reader will typically re-check feeds once an hour. I’m not sure how pings work though.
December 21st, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Sorry to hear that Reader isn’t quite cutting for you. Matt is right that we can only crawl sites so often. However, we are researching ways in which we can lower the overall delay, though we will most likely never work like a desktop reader where you can just hit refresh and force it to recrawl feeds (imagine if all our users did that).
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
December 21st, 2006 at 3:34 pm
I use Newsgator online, on my mac, and on my phone with windows mobile 5. It is fast, and I did have to pay for the phone and desktop version - but it synchronizes across all 3.
December 21st, 2006 at 5:45 pm
I like SharpReader - allows flagging of articles, locking (so you don’t accidently delete), showing only unread items, and downloading of comments. It’s offline, so I can catch up when I’m away from wifi. I haven’t noticed any latency, and you can set how old is “old”, how often to check for new feeds, etc.
Only thing I don’t like is that there is no undelete and I can’t seem to find a trashcan. If I accidently hit delete too quickly, I have to go back to the homepage for that feed to see the article.
December 22nd, 2006 at 6:32 am
I agree, it’s a bitch to get the right reader. That’s why I built my own out of Carp and MYSQL.
I suppose I could juice it up so the public can use it, but there is eggnog to be drunk.
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:25 pm
I loved Sage, then I switched to Tiny Tiny rss which I installed on a private subdomain of mine and customized a little bit of the CSS to make it more friendly for my eyes.
I run over 300 feeds in there, it have tagging, stars, categories, ompl export and it’s like using a mixture of outlook and gmail… easy to use and really light ;D.. give it a try, I’ve tried all readers (bc I’m lazy about boring and hard applications)
http://tt-rss.spb.ru/trac/
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:59 pm
I personally use Opera’s built-in feedreader and i definitly like it.
December 24th, 2006 at 3:07 am
Keep us updated Grey, I’m looking to switch from Google Reader as well and I’d love to know what you find for a solution.
December 28th, 2006 at 12:43 am
I’m a big fan of Sage, cannot find anything with better functionality
January 7th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Newsfox works for me. http://newsfox.mozdev.org/
January 8th, 2007 at 3:03 am
The Wizz RSS News Reader for Firefox is actually a MUCH better feed reading option. It is far richer than Sage, offering many features and options. Like the ability to automatically check feeds for new content, the ability to hide items that have already been read, the ability to filter feeds, etc., etc., etc.
Try it, I’m sure you’ll agree.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/424/
January 8th, 2007 at 10:40 am
I’m using RSS Bandit (Windows).
Describing it as brilliant would be conservative. I haven’t found anything better for my personal taste:
http://www.rssbandit.org/
BTW, it’s an open source application.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I’m searching for “delayless” RSS reader which can display all feeds in a single window (sorted by publication time).