Jan 20 2009

Gimme a good RSS reader. Please?

Published by Dougal at 9:36 pm under Computing

RSS: really simple syndication. Neat packaging of online content in a computer readable wrapping. Like barcodes for websites, no?

It’s a great idea that I really want to use properly. But I’ve never found a good way to read syndicated websites. They all seem to miss out on something important — either by skipping out important content like images and embedded videos, or badly processing the text so half the text turns into gibberish.

Anyone have a recommended way of reading RSS sites? I’m reaching the limit of the number of sites I can remember…

6 responses so far

6 Responses to “Gimme a good RSS reader. Please?”

  1. # Calumon 20 Jan 2009 at 10:03 pm

    I’ve been playing around with Google Reader since reaching a similar pain point and being recommended it; it’s pretty good, embedded content appears to work (and be adorned with “popout” options), it’s never garbled anything for me, and it’s a well thought-out UI as well. I find being able to access things from multiple locations easily a big advantage too but that’s maybe not so much for yourself.

    It’s not ideal but it’s the best I’ve found so far.

  2. # Dougalon 20 Jan 2009 at 10:58 pm

    I will give Google Reader a proper look, for lack of anything better.

  3. # Lawrenceon 21 Jan 2009 at 7:29 am

    On the mac, both Newsfire and Netnewswire are good (I use the former, and even paid for it!) I believe

  4. # Nickon 22 Jan 2009 at 7:02 pm

    I can confirm that NetNewsWire is very good, and free. It syncs via NewsGator, as well, which means you can read all your feeds online as well and you get IMAP “read here = read there” type behaviour.

  5. # Robert Hulmeon 07 Feb 2009 at 5:22 pm

    I’d be interested to know your thoughts on Google Reader (that’s what I use). They did a major update on it today (although it gets rolled out to users over time).

    I get about ~450 incoming posts a day on it now.

  6. # Dougalon 09 Feb 2009 at 8:42 am

    I have been using Google Reader since I wrote this post. It’s quite good: easy to add stuff to and fairly easy to read everything in one go. Being available online is the useful, also. Like my own Planet page. Also links to the original blog post/website are quite prominent, which I appreciate. I haven’t seen any updates since I’ve been using it yet. But it took ages for the Gmail upgrade to make it as far as me, so I suppose I’ll just give it time.