Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

Will and Rock were so excited when I showed them the Live Bookmarks feature of FireFox that I thought I would make a post about RSS options in more detail.

If you’re like me, you have a lot of reading to do every morning. It’s a lot of hard work keeping up with the constant onslaught of new stuff hitting the ‘ol internet. Luckily the sites most of us frequent for this kind of Internet and technology information all have RSS feeds.

Simply put, RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. This includes sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. There’s 7 different RSS formats, which I won’t get into right now because that’s a completely different post and would take forever, and because most modern RSS readers that are out now will handle any format you throw at them.

My site is syndicated in RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92 and Atom. If I have the option at a site, I usually select the RSS 2.0 feed. I have no reason for this, it’s just something I do.

Anyhow, what do you use for reading RSS feeds? Well, I use NetNewsWire exclusively because I only read on my G5 at the office. I realize not everyone has a Mac though, so here is my list of decent RSS readers.

MacOS X: NetNewsWire

As far as I’m concerned, this is the best. That might just be because I love Mac applications in general. This is clean and well organized. It has a great list of blogs and news sites on the right that you can subscribe to and has a wonderful bookmarkish folder view for organizing your feeds into categories.

Windows: SharpReader

Sharp is very comparable to NetNewsWire. It has the same organization as you see in most readers. You can also keep it running and set your refresh time and it will notify you to new posts in your subscriptions. Sort of like that horribly annoying AIM notification on Windows that everyone turns off immediately. You need to install .NET framework to use it.

Linux: Straw

Straw is for Gnome. Unfortunately, I only know of this because for the last few years I’ve only used Gnome. I’m not sure if there’s a comparable KDE solution but I’m sure there’s something. Straw is excellent though and I love Gnome. It’s win/win.

Anywhere: Bloglines

If you’re at different computers all the time, I recommend Bloglines. You might compare it to those mobile bookmark sites where you can store your bookmarks and view them anywhere.

So I don’t want to see anyone with 500 tabs open in Safari or Firefox anymore. Go get an RSS reader and save yourself.