Slashdot Mirror

... and so far it's working great for me (RSSOwl). I also tried The Old Reader, and quite liked it except for its inability to mix all feeds into one continuous timeline.

I have been using RSSowl for years and will keep doing so as I never found a better reader. Runs almost everywhere, displays RSS, manages feeds and is quite configureable.

uh... and it's free and open source, of course.

Really dislike most RSS readers, be they web-based or otherwise, because they are either too simplistic, or just have a bad layout; I've found RSSOwl to be an extremely good RSS reader, which I've been using for about a year and a half now, and is open-source/cross-platform too.

For me, it's pretty much perfect, but I will caveat that it has a longstanding bug, where certain feeds don't update properly, due to having certain 'atom' element formatting; not a huge problem, but have been waiting for a fix for that a very long time; other than that though, this is a really great program.

Check out, and take time to explore, http://www.rssowl.org/

You get an overview of ALL stuff from ALL feeds, or just from invididual categories/feeds you selected (which acts recursively, which is awesome).

Google Reader is a JOKE.

Plus, it's Google, so wtf is wrong with people anyway :P Isn't it enough they have web analytics on every site of the planet, and that that half of the feeds go through feedburner on top of that? Why not at least read the other half of the feeds in peace... ? I don't even read any feeds that are controversial in the slightest, it's mostly webdev stuff, but still, I have principles :/

May I ask why you were disappointed? I.e. what did you expect, what did you get instead?

I use it all the time, it's like email for websites. Thank fuck just about anyone who writes tutorials or articles they really care about uses a blogging system which outputs RSS. When I see a good site I don't bookmark it to revisit occasionally, I subscribe to the RSS feed. I still end up visiting those sites to read the articles as they're actually supposed to look, but at least I don't have to "do the rounds" anymore.

I also intend to use it for my CMS to import stuff I'm posting elsewhere to the web as text/links. Then all that can be distributed to Facebook or whatever via RSS, and more importantly is available with a big fat orange icon on the site itself.

Though I just wish there were more/better RSS reader client thingies. I use http://www.rssowl.org/, and I'm super happy other than with the inbuilt browser, the feeling it could be faster and that development has stopped/slowed down. I'm loving the features, you can do so much with that thing, and categorize feeds so you can keep track of dozens and hundreds easily.

Can anyone recommend good newsfeed readers? I'm sure they're out there, I just don't know 'em..

Also, what's the easiest way to get going to code a cross-platform Qt application? I'd rather start making my own crappy RSS client, instead of just hoping they won't go away. Fuck if anyone uses it, RSS for life! :D

I am probably an exception to the rule, but I just counted up the different individual news feeds in my NewsReader's (Default-RSS OWL Java OS) start-up OPML file, and there are 1074 unique feeds in it. Granted, there are a few major Mainstream News site feeds that I just recently updated the feed lists from their RSS pages, and haven't yet filtered out the many I consider to be irrelevant from them. Two I recently rescraped but haven't filtered are are McClatchy News and the NYTimes, but even after filtering, the number will still be around 1000.

There are many different reasons for using RSS Feeds. It's more than just keeping up on your favorite web pastime sites. I usually have anywhere from five to ten Google news feeds for specific current event topics I am interested in. For any who dislike the default number of 10 articles that the GoogleNews generated feeds provides as default, add a new parameter argument at the beginning of them (after the ? in the RSS feed URL):

num={varX}&

where {varX} is the number of different headlines desired. I haven't checked, but would not be surprised to find an upper limiter on the number, and 100 would be my first guess.

I keep an eye on the feeds provided for open source software packages I use, for notices of upgrades, bugfixes, security issues etc.

I keep an eye on the wonkage produced by many Tanks/Policy orgs via RSS Feeds. I scan tanks/org I generally agree/disagree with, as well as those I consider to be POV neutral.

There are a few very specific feeds to aid in my work and personal free-time collaboration projects.

I desire to acquire as much data input as my mind is capable of assimilating. The issue is avoiding buffer overflows. Any good feed filtering software available that I can use with a high degree of confidence in its results is appreciated, and I am always curious about untried packages.

RSSOwl http://www.rssowl.org/ I agree that whatever it is doing shouldn't be necessary but I just wish I had a choice between answering the prompt EVERY time I open this, and turn off UAC completely. I can't believe that Microsoft didn't read some of the beta reviews that mentioned that the UAC could be much less annoying if it had mechanism for "whitelisting" an app. Maybe they just couldn't think of a secure way to implement it.

Does anyone else find the icon quite similar to another popular icon?

Anyone who's been using rssreaders will already be aware of this. The guys behind the excellent Rssowl disabled 'execution of active content' quite some time ago. So if you executed some unknown quantity whilst reading Dilbert, it was your own fault (for not vetting the source of the feed in the 1st place). The average PC is already filled to the gills with xml configuration files. As long as the developers and eventually the users don't do something silly...Doh!!!