Feed Readers

in the early evening on Thursday, the 3rd of March 2005 by Chad

I’ve been looking at just about every feed reader I could find in the last few days. What is a feed reader you may ask? No problem!

A feed reader is generally a program that runs on your desktop (although it can be web based) that goes out to all the news, blogs, etc., sites that have constantly changing content, and download the new stories for you right to your desktop.

If you have ever seen links like this:, or a little orange block that says XML then that site will syndicate its content to feed readers, also known as RSS readers, since RSS was the first standard.

So you can have all three hundred and forty seven blogs you read on a daily basis, along with feeds from Fox News (not CNN because they don’t even give you a story synopsis!), slashdot, and who knows how many other sites out there.

Back to the point at hand… So I’ve created a single list of the fifty some feeds that I read regularly, and imported them into about a dozen different RSS readers and used each of them for as long as I could stand it. For some reason, all of them, including the commercial software, all felt like beta software to me. Most are based on the .net platform from Microsoft, which means they’re slow, take forever to load, and hang for no apparent reason sometimes. The slowest and the least useful were almost immediately removed.

What I was looking for was a clean outlook style interface. Some blogs only publish an excerpt, or the first two-three sentences. To read the entire article, you have to click something to open up that articles web page. That process has to be easy to do, typically by just doubleclicking the subject line instead of single clicking it to read the excerpt, which would preferrably open up in the same window. And when the full page is opened it makes a lot of sites barf because of errant javascript code. The feed reader should not make you click several times per article to clear out this error.

Next on the list has to be an easy way to add new feed sources. This should almost be automatic by simply clicking a single button. I’d like to see one of these readers come with IE and Firefox plugins so that when you are browsing normally, a new feed is but a click away.

So I narrowed down the list and finally found one I am relatively happy with. Its open source, free software, has a nice interface with only a few minor quibbles, and seems to be rather speedy. It is also undergoing active development, which is nice.

The winner is, RSS Bandit!

Yes, it does have a few flaws still. The one I would like to see is that when opening up the normal HTML full article page, it can open up just in the standard window instead of using a new tab. But at least it uses a tab, which is pretty nice! So far this is a big winner. Give it a try, I think you will like it. I just keep finding more and more little things I like about it!