RSS Feed Readers; The Journey

For some time now I’ve been looking for a RSS feed reader that suits me. I’ve tried a couple out there; Blog Bridge, firefox and IE’s inbuilt feed reader, Feed Demon, Yahoo Mail. I’ve even built my own in Adobe AIR porting an old Ext JS example across and tweaking it. Still I’m not happy.

The problem is that they all seem to do a part of what I want, but none of them seems to do everything all in one place. If I had to lay out the criteria of what I want in a feed reader it would look something like this:

1. Cross-platform

   I use Linux at home so this is an absolute must. I’ve been pretty impressed by Feed Demon but it’s not available for Linux.

2. Work online and offline

   I often wish I could read my feeds on the bus or somewhere else where I don’t have connectivity.

3. Notify me when new posts are available

   I absolutely loath having to log in every time, or open the application to check my stuff. I want timely delivery of information dammit!

4. Keep track of read and unread posts

   Sounds simple but you’d be surprised how many don’t offer this.

5. Allow me to organise my post into some logical structure

   Again, simple but loads of readers out there are really inflexible when it comes to managing your feeds.

6. Provide some sort of stats on what I tend to read and what I dont seem all that interested in

   This is great as it allows me to recognise when I need to prune my feeds and tidy up, or conversely when I’ve been neglecting things I really should be in the know about.

7. Provide some sort of distributed subscription model

   To clarify, I don’t want to have to maintain two lists of subscriptions; one on my laptop and one on my workstation. This is where most of the desktop readers fall down (bar Feed Demon which uses the News Gator subscription service).

Fussy I know. But a man wants what he wants and well that’s the way it is right?

Anyway Feed Demon was mightly close. It had many of the features I’m after but a few critical shortcomings. So I continued my search. Recently I’ve been having a bit of a play with Google Reader and I have to say that I’m impressed.

Looks can be deceiving, and this is definitely the case with Google Reader. When I first looked at it I thought it was rather plain and uninteresting, but once I started digging a bit deeper and getting the hang of it I found that it offers nearly everything I want and more besides. The only thing lacking is the notifications bit (MSN style desktop popups and such), but I’ve got a google widget on my iGoogle page that keeps me up to date quite nicely. If anything it’s nice to not have the distraction like Feed Demon whirring away.

The best feature by far IMO is the Google Gears integration that allows me to view my feeds offline. All you need to do is click a button and it will sync your feeds with the Gears DB and viola! Your feeds are available whenever you are.

Check it out if you’re interested: http://www.google.com/reader/