Slashdot Mirror
RSSOwl 1.2 Released
Benjamin Pasero over at RSSOwl.org wrote to tell us that they have released version 1.2 for their RSS/RDF/Atom newsfeed viewer. It looks like a lot of work has gone into this version. Some of the new features are; a fully customizable toolbar with new elements like 'History', new search scopes allow for more detailed searches, a new 'Linked Mode' to update selection in your favorites automatically, support for Atom 1.0 format, and quite a few others.
This is an honest question and not an attempt to troll or bait. (Posted AC because I fear gettting moded to hell)
What can an RSS/Atom reader do for me?
I have no problem browsing my favorite sites once or twice a day, and enjoy doing so. What am I missing out on?
Great software. Pity it doesn't use Swing. But wait maybe it is the reason why it is great software.
Million Dollar Screenshot
Freshmeat ??
"Those who do not understand USENET are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I agree with your points, but would also add that an aggregator also gives you some things that a web browser doesn't.
For one, you can save locally-cached copies of posts. Yes, a web browser also has a cache, but you can't typically have both easy and fine-grained control of the content you keep or throw away. Some sites that have feeds have mediocre connectivity (and feeds were originally promoted partly as a bandwidth saver--you don't download as much content at once). Some authors have a nasty habit of deleting the best content. By archiving it in an aggregator, you can save the best stuff.
Aggregators also let you search over all relevant feeds and only those feeds. No more dealing with separate search engines, with their separate "advanced search" syntax (or, worse, very basic or non-existent searches).
Finally, an aggregator lets you apply filters so that the best, most relevant content sees your eyes & bad/spammy content doesn't. I keep my feeds in Thunderbird, and treat some blogs as email--I apply Bayesian filters to particularly noise-filled feeds (such as comment feeds), and sort content topically. Some aggregators eliminate or group related posts that come from different feeds. Some let you push these posts (which have the most "buzz") to the top, so you don't miss it.
Pardon my French, but who the fuck cares? Why do I need to read about RSSOwl on Slashdot? I can understand reading about a new release of KDE or Gnome or the kernel or something, but a NEWS reader?
Yawn.
I've just recently discovered bloglines after using firefox & sage to keep up with my many RSS feeds.
Can anyone enlighten me as to if (and if so why) one should be using this instead of bloglines? This is not bashing, I'm just interested into what people use and why.
Why do I need a seperate program to view this type of content? Doesn't it make more sense to implement such an implementation in a browser? Personally, I have been using Bloglines for a long time (and more recently netvibes). Google and Microsoft also seem to be going this way.
Of course, as long as an application supports the importing and exporting of OPML it doesn't matter what you use, because switching is easy. However, I can't really justify running a whole seperate application that seems to do little other than launching Firefox anyway.
The problems i've had with a lot of rss readers is that they're SLOW because they use an xml database (opml file) the reader i use uses sql-lite or someother sql database for it's storage and while that causes problems when you shutdown the process without exiting properly it makes for an extermely fast rss reader.
With RSSOwl, I can watch for software releases on Freshmeat, so no one will ever, ever again need to post software release announcements to Slashdot!
Thanks, RSSOwl!
In 2003 I got a 'dashboard' that was one screen in size. Within a year it had grown to ten pages.
In 2005 we got RSS and now Atom. I went from 5 websites to numerous.
In all these situations I got lost in the information. after about ten minutes of study I became hopelessly lost and forgot what it was I was trying to understand. A lot of the time the data contradicted itself. In 1999 they removed 1.5 tons of scrap computer print out reports from that storage room (I only used it). At least that's what the guy said who took it.
We call this cyclical trends. In all these years the only thing I've gotten from this is conflicting, confusing and useless information. I got the best information from talking to people.
I really enjoy the simple life.
I've been using Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/ for about a year, and find it does a great job of aggregating rss, xml, atom and other kinds of feeds. I can move from machine to machine without a problem.
Would there be any advantage in switching to something like rssowl or liferea?
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
RSS is nice, but this software product is not really anything special or unique.
Does anyone else find the icon quite similar to another popular icon?
It looks ok. If you're on windows, though, you should try RSS Bandit - An excellent open source .NET feed reader!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
So, am I the *only* on on /. who even thought about the semantic web and the Web Ontology language (OWL) when this post was announced? I for one assumed this had something to do with RSS and OWL - in my opinion, a name with double entendre..
Vik
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
maybe this belongs in an Ask Slashdot thread about which RSS reader works best for me. I am sure that RSSOwl is a nice little program, but I would actually prefer a topic to discuss RSS readers in general, such as local client vs. web, feature set, reading web pages in the program versus in the browser, etc.
RssFwd or R-Mail forwarding to your Gmail account. Done and done.
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Promoting critical thinking since 1994.