Despite the prevalence of sites utilizing RSS technology, and the apparent simplicity involved in subscribing to a given site rather than compulsively returning to it every thirty minutes, it would seem logical for one who monitors more sites than can fit on one hand to watch them via an RSS feed.

But still, I’ve yet to join the boat on this one. There are a number of reasons I haven’t quite bothered, yet:

• I really prefer going to “the source” for information, though in truth this is a weak excuse overall and doesn’t weigh in heavily to my resistance.
• I’ve yet to find (and am too lazy to continue looking) for a reader that meets my needs, and fear that if I ever do at a later date it’ll be far too much a pain to export and import my work (which means I’d have to do it all manually, which isn’t cool).
• I’ve yet to figure out the “ideal” scenario for my RSS reading. I figure the web-based method has some benefits, since it’ll update everything regardless of where you are, but the level of control one has on a desktop is more reassuring to me (though in all, web-based probably wins out). I’d also really like it if there were a way that I could read my feeds even if I’m not online (minus one for the web-based approach), and it would be really nice if my Pocket PC could sync up and store some number of recent feeds for me to catch up on when I have a spare moment away from a computer.
• Oh, yeah, it has to be free. I don’t really care to pay for software (instead I find free alternatives, e.g. The GIMP, Wax, BitPim, Thunderbird, etc.)

So I guess in truth I’d like to see some sort of hybrid web-desktop reader that fetches from the web and downloads on to the PC. Export functions are great. Pocket PC synchronization would probably be some sort of holy grail of awesomeness. And it needs to be free.

So what do you all use, and what can you recommend for me?

Comments (2) | Geekish

Trackback this post from your own site. You can also follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

2 Responses to “I need a decent RSS reader”

1. Erik says:
   Thursday July 20 2006 @ 12:44:25 am

   Skidde? Is that you? What’s up?

   I like Google Reader for my RSS Feeds. Once it adds a “mark all as read” feature, it will rule.

2. Matt says:
   Thursday July 20 2006 @ 5:30:11 pm

   Use Firefox’s. Functionality-wise it’s a lightweight, but people never really used PDAs to begin with.

Leave a Reply