The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Recommend a free RSS reader?

Recommend a free RSS reader?

I need one that pulls everything for offline viewing (I use dialup), runs on Windows and doesn't need .NET. And free.

Thanks.

Alex.ro
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

AmphetaDesk ( http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ ).

Very lightweight, runs in a browser UI (very convenient with Mozilla and tabs).

Development has been frozen for over a year now, but the author has intimated recently that there will be a new release soon.

Every once in a while I try out other free clients, but none can compete with the ease of use of AmphetaDesk along with Mozilla.

ICBW
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Thanks! I'll give it a try. I happen to use Firebird so it should fit great.

Alex.ro
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

I have been using bloglines.com for about a month and have stopped using my client rss readers entirely.

Chris McEvoy
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

I was using a client-side RSS reader, then I wrote my own server-side reader in Java, then got tired of working on it and switched to BlogLines.

BlogLines is great!

Spleenor
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Thanks for the heads up on blogsline. I remember looking for something like this a long time ago and coming up short. I guess I should have posted the question here! :)

Crimson
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

I"m a little late to the RSS party... I've just been bookmarking interesting blogs until now. <g> Another word of thanks for the Bloglines suggestion.

One question, perhaps betraying my RSS noobishness -- Bloglines displays some blogs with the full text of the blog, while it displays other blogs with just a quick summary. For example, I have this problem with Panopticon Central:

http://www.panopticoncentral.net/rss.aspx

The blog's XML contains the full text of the blog entry (in the "xhtml:body" field). However, Bloglines just displays the content of the "description" field, instead of the full content of the entry. The only way to read the content of this blog is to click through to the original blog site, which seems to defeat the benefit of using an RSS reader. (Bloglines displays other blogs just fine.)

Is this a bug, or some incompatibility with the XML feed?

Robert Jacobson
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

there is no 'body' field in RSS.
looks like someone (perhaps the person whose blog you are reading, perhaps some larger group) has extended it to contain a body, and some readers might understand it.
otherwise, they'll ignore it.

mb
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Ah... it looks like there's a movement afoot to use "body" tags, even though they're not supported by the RSS specifications:

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1299.html
http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2003/04/23-74.html
http://jclark.org/weblog/WebDev/Blosxom/xhtmlbody.html

This strikes me as a really bad idea -- breaking compatibility with RSS readers like Bloglines.

Robert Jacobson
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

but it doesn't really break compatibility, no more than if you decided to add an image tag or a soundfile tag.

that's what's nice about ignore rules. of course XML doesn't specify them very well, but RSS does. (any tag you don't understand, you ignore).

atom (in-progress syndication/etc format, http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage ) probably supports this, since it's designed for full fidelty syndication of stuff. RSS is really designed for headlines, and people often explictly set their 'description' to a tease.

mb
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

If Bloglines doesn't support xhtml:body, then weep for their slow speed. That header has been around for ages, and really everybody does support it. Except Bloglines, of course. :-p

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Wednesday, December 31, 2003

are there any choice rss readers which are ticker style? I seem to search in vain..?

i like i
Friday, January 2, 2004

I'm using NewsGator http://www.newsgator.com (sorry, not free, but good value. offline mode pending but probably in next release), but heard good things about SharpReader http://www.sharpreader.net/ (sorry, no personal experience).
It is .NET based, but why do you care about the runtime? Unless you are running on an extremely thight memory budget you will probably not notice anyway.

Just me (Sir to you)
Friday, January 2, 2004

Sharpreader is great, thanks for the link! So you see, .NET is actually good for something. :)

Chris Nahr
Friday, January 2, 2004