Newsreaders (RSS) and FeedDemon

A newsreader is a program which allows you to read and organize “feeds” from news sources, magazines, blogs and other sources, including podcasts and videocasts. Think of it as a headline service, which presents you with just the headlines, or just the headlines and a synopsis of the feed, allowing you to pick and choose which ones you’ll drill into.

You can collect the feeds all at once, or you can simply have the program collect the feeds in the background at predetermined intervals. The program doesn’t download the detailed information unless you request it. The detailed information is usually displayed in a brower window and doesn’t clutter up your hard drive. A good program can keep track of what you’ve seen and what you haven’t, can easily mark all unwanted feeds as read, and can retain only a certain number of items in each folder or can delete all feeds older than a certain date.

I’ve played around with several different newreaders, but by far the best has been feedDemon. It wasn’t free when I started to use it, and even though it is now, it’s been worth every penny I’ve spent on it. Great browser integration, a nice “panic button” for clearing out old items, and very good automatic handling and downloading of podcasts.

It was bought out by NewGator (newsgator.com) and became free software. The best part about the integration with NewsGator is that FeedDemon synchronizes with their web service so you have all your feeds available via the web when you’re away from home, and their service remembers which feeds you’ve read and which you haven’t with the FeedDemon client. And as a bonus, if you have FeedDemon on multiple machines, they stay synchronized so you aren’t presented as unread old feeds you’ve read on your other machines.

Only two things on the wish list to make it perfect. First, make it portable or put out a portable version so we can take it around with us on a USB stick. OK… you can always go to the NewGator web site (free account) to read your feeds, but using the reader is so much nicer. And please either make a Linux version, or make it so it can be run under WINE (to be explained in another post).

FeedDemon is one of my last reasons to still be using Windows. I use Liferea with Linux, but it’s not nearly as slick and the synchronization capability of FeedDemon has no rival. Good stuff.