I know I’ve been a little slow posting here over the last week or so, but
things should return to normal for a few days at least as things low
down a little in my life. However, the hectic pace of life has not been the
only thing keeping me from posting as often as I would like, my rss reader
has.
For those of you unfamiliar with RSS it’s a technology that allows you to
subscriber to the content of a web site, much as you would with an email subscription,
but without the hassle of spam and having to open multiple emails and visit
the site every time there’s a content change.
RSS feeds, are collected by an aggregator, or reader. Essentially a piece
of software (or online tool) that checks all of your subscribed blogs/sites
etc, for updates and displays the new postings on screen. You can get a summary
or the full post.
I love RSS, but before I go any further, and before someone points this
out, let me just say that I’m using RSS as a generic term for all the types
of feeds you can get from a site. There are a couple of flavours of RSS, not
to mention other standards such as atom as well. But to the end user they
make little difference as most feed readers can read them all.
I’ve been using SharpReader for
ages, and I love it, or at least I used to. It’s a neat piece of software,
has all the features you could want and is still under development. It’s an
awesome piece of free software (we love free around here) for the new to average
user of rss, or people who just don’t subscribe to many feeds. I say this
because my problems started to happen once my number of feeds increased beyond 500. At 500 (or there about, can’t be sure) things started to get slow, real
slow, as it tried to pull in all the feeds, but it’s not a bandwidth issue,
it became a cpu usage issue, as it hogged all my resources and it was difficult
to do anything else.
Before you say, upgrade your computer, I was running SharpReader on “”Danger
Mouse”", that’s the AMD 2800+ with 1GB of Ram, and not much else open except
maybe Dreamweaver MX 2004. As the number of subscribed feeds approached the
850 mark things became unbearable, and SharpReader would buckle under the
pressure, resulting in crashes of SharpReader and of my computer. So, you
can see why things got annoying, plus I couldn’t find an option anywhere to
turn off the popup’s when feeds had new content.
So, a couple of days ago I exported my list of feeds as an OPML file and
began hunting for a new FREE news reader. I was pointed to a couple of different
services, none of which really floated my goat (as they say) and couple of
online aggregators, but the online thing isn’t what I want really. Eventually
I found Feedreader and
life has been bliss for the last two days.
Feedreader handles the load like a dream, it’s open in the background now,
along with Dreamweaver, Firefox and a couple of other bits and bobs. It’s
got a clean uncluttered interface, and the way it imports feeds from an OPML
file is brilliant. It doesn’t just import them all and let you sort them out
later (you can if you want), but it allows you to set up folders first, to
group types of feeds, i.e.: Friends Blogs, news, site searches etc. Then
as you the OPML is imported you can assign individual or groups of feeds to
various folders, or chose not to import certain feeds at all. Really cool!
Feedreader still has far to go, and it’s till under development, I’m using
2.7 Build 646 at the moment and still lacks some features such as
threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded
fashion.
However it does make up for this by allowing you to turn off the
popup when feeds update! Okay, that doesn’t make up for the lack of threading,
but it makes me a lot happier as I hate those popup’s. I only update my
feeds a couple of times a day, maybe 3 at most. That’s once in the morning,
once around lunch time, and once in the evening. At 850+ feeds, that’s typically
thousands of posts each time which means a lot of bandwidth. While bandwidth
isn’t a concern for me in terms of my home connection, It can be a concern
for many sites hosting blogs, as some news readers try to update their content
every 30 minutes. Imagine, the bandwidth use at 850+ feeds every 30 minutes!!
Feedreader helps avoid this, firstly by having the default set to 60 minutes,
although I’d prefer to see it set at 3 hours or even 6 hours, but you can
always change it to a manual update is as well.
All in all I’m impressed by Feedreader. It’s does exactly what it says on
the tin!
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