After Mozilla Thunderbird started misbehaving on me, I renewed my quest to find a good RSS reader. Thunderbird would add all the articles (seen and unseen) to the feed list; this resulted in massive duplication. Quite annoying. I've found two RSS readers that look good: RSSOwl and Liferea.
RSSOwl is written in Java and seems to have all the features I want. The only downside I've found is that I can't simply emerge a Gentoo package to get it installed.
Liferea is written specifically for GTK and Gnome. It seems to have good integration with other Linux programs such as Mozilla's rendering engine. Offhand, it doesn't seem as featureful as RSSOwl.
Anyone out there have an experience with either they want to share? I'll post back later with my reviews.
Posted by enigma at July 13, 2005 08:08 AMI used liferea for quite some time at the recommendation of of jeffgus. Really my only complaint with it at the time was instability and rapid release of new buggy versions. This really was nothing to fault an early project with.
I think the advantage it had over more mature readers like straw, was its drag and drop folder management. It looked good, and worked well.
I did play around with RSSOwl. And it struck me as superior in features, but the ui didn't work for me. I don't remember exactly, but it worked differently than the 3 pane interface I was used to. I think it made it difficult to quickly see content, and decide whether to dive in or not.
I moved from liferea as my primary reader to bloglines.com. Primarily because I wanted something accessible regardless of what machine or os I was in. As a web based reader its the best I have seen, and I realized since half the time I was rendering html in liferea anyway, it made sense.
Great features include a firefox extension for finding and adding feeds for a page. Saving interesting feed items into a "clip blog" area, or publishing right from their to a blog. I don't use it very much, but the clip area is a good place to stick stuff you plan to elaborate on later. It can also generate a blogroll for inclusion on your own blog. And other xml fun.
The only thing that tends to bug me, is that its really a two pane interface. You click on a feed title on the left, and you get the full or summary entries on the right. This creates a condition where clicking once, marks the entire feed read (because you have seen it on the right pane). I find myself not going into feeds that I dont' have to read all entries.
Fortunately there is a "mark all new", and a check box on each item for "keep new". But these methods I believe are inferior to having entry titles to peruse with a mouse or arrow keys. Obviously, without going with more ajax like functionality, they have to dumb down the interface for speed reasons. It would be annoying to have to load each entry for a feed one by one. Another thing which is more difficult is folder management. Nothings faster than drag and drop on liferea.
So I continue to use bloglines, and hope that the ui will improve over time. The fact that its available to me from any browser is an overriding benefit. And the fact that it imports and exports opml quite well gives me the freedom to use it without lock in. And they have published a web service, which could bring about some fun stuff. Linux Journal covered it in an article.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7828