Milkduds

RSS Reader Roundup

January 6th, 2005

My main reason for researching RSS readers was because I am currently in the beginning stages of deploying Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 for our company’s Intranet, and the only good information out there resides on people’s blogs. So, the best way to keep informed on new blog posts is by using an RSS reader to view all your blogs in one place. The following are my reviews of Thunderbird, RSS Bandit, Feedreader, RSSOwl, and SharpReader.

The very first thing I tried was Mozilla Thunderbird because I tested it out for mail once and saw that it read RSS feeds. Adding feeds was easy, but it didn’t let you choose what to name it while adding it, so it took whatever the title of the feed was as the name. I ended up with a lot of feeds just called “Sharepoint”, but you could change the name after that fact so it wasn’t really a big deal. A handfull of the blogs I read are blocked by my company’s web proxy, so I just use a ssh tunnel to get past that. I pointed Thunderbird to my proxy and the previously blocked feeds came through without a hitch! In Thunderbird, you can set how often to update each feed or use the global setting, it will mark which items in a feed that you’ve read, and it will put a red asterisk next to any feed that has been updated since you last opened the feed’s folder. But the one thing Thunderbird was missing was a way for me to hide the program to the system tray and alert or notify me when a feed has new items. So, I went to look for more options.

My first stop for software these days is SourceForge.Net, so I went there and did a search for RSS readers and it came back with basically 3 hits for the Windows platform. RSSBandit, Feedreader, and RSSOwl. I tried each of these first before going to Google.

I tried out Feedreader and was immediately impressed by the polished yet simple look. It was easy to add feeds and gave out desktop alert notifications for each feed when a feed was updated with new items. I started adding all of my Sharepoint feeds, which I could rename before the folder was added. But, of course, the ones that were blocked didn’t download the feed. So, I looked in the settings and found a place to put in proxy information, which I promptly filled out. I refreshed one of the “blocked” feeds, but no dice. I double-checked my settings and the url I was giving Feedreader, and they were both right. I did a quick check on the site for help on this issue, then Google, but no solution.

Before going any futher, I decided to try out RSS Bandit. This requires the Microsoft .NET 1.1 Runtime, but I already had that, so I was good to go. The install was quick, but the app takes longer than most to load, but there seem to be a lot more features in RSS Bandit. It has it’s own web browser to use for the links you find in posts. It has a built in validator, and does either a notification for each feed and/or a general X feeds updated tooltip on the system tray icon. But the coolest feature that no other RSS reader has is that it will let you upload/download your feed list on an FTP server, fileshare, webdav, or something called dasBlog. I opted to try this out with webdav on my home server since I already had that set up. But before that, I had to set up my feeds. I tried a couple normal ones, then a couple of the blocked ones, and those didn’t work. I put in my proxy information and still no dice. I’m starting to see a pattern here. Did a quick search on the site and Google, but nothing helped. I wanted to try out the upload feed feature before moving on, so I put in my webdav info and uploaded the feed successfully. Then, I remoted into my machine at home, installed RSS Bandit, put in my webdav info, then downloaded the feed successfully. So, when I leave work, I just upload my feed by using CTRL+SHIFT+U then when I get home, I just open RSS Bandit, hit CTRL+SHIFT+D and my feeds are synchronized!

To see if I could get my proxy working, I decided to move on and download RSSOwl. It requires Java 1.4 or higher to run. I was so impressed by RSS Bandit’s feed sync feature and noticed that RSSOwl didn’t have that on it’s list that I immediately just tried to see if it would take my proxy information correctly. RSSOwl was actually pretty nice looking, but confused me at first. You are taken to a screen without showing you any feed lists. I added a blocked feed, but didn’t see anything show up. After looking at the View menu, I noticed that the list was hidden by default, so I opened it up. I clicked on the folder and was shown some sort of error that the feed wasn’t available. Next!

My last stop was a reader I kept seeing mentioned when I did a Google search for RSS readers, which as SharpReader. It also requires .NET 1.1. Its feature list didn’t mention anything about a feed sync, so my first test was seeing if it could handle my proxy. Nope. I got the same exact error message on SharepReader as RSS Bandit gave me, so I did a Google search on it and it appears to be a common bug in some proxy code that most .Net developers seem to be using.

Since I don’t have endless amounts of time to research every RSS reader, I decided to quit and use RSS Bandit since I think I’ll get a lot out of the sync feature. I also think it does the best presentation of desktop notifications and it has a lot of other features most readers don’t have. Maybe I’ll come up with a feature matrix table of some sort to compare them all. I saw a site where a guy did that will blogware and that helped me to pick Wordpress, so maybe I’ll do that.

Look for this post to be updated in the future.

Entry Filed under: Technology