Law Students

in market for new feed reader

By Luis

Mis suscripciones RSS by torchondo. License:

I’ve finally gotten fed up with my feed reader. Most of the time I don’t really care if my feeds are updated in a timely manner, but when I want it timely I want it timely. Like, on election day, I want my politics feeds to update more often (and more predictably) than every 3-6 hours. Really bizarre that Google hasn’t figured that out. (It isn’t like I’m the first person to complain about that.) And of course I’d like to improve my software autonomy, as usual, which I’m not doing right now.

Anyway, so- anyone have any recommendations that meet the following criteria?

MUST HAVE:

• river of news view: nothing but the feeds; no controls, no nothing.
• ’starred’ or ‘flagged’: must be able to mark a post for later investigation/publication/etc.
• keynav: must be able to do next/prev feed and flag/star for later reading with a single keystroke.
• fonts: must be easy to blow up feed text to very large fonts- much larger than other application fonts. Any gnome-based app that relies on the system font setting is out, for example, since I’m not going to switch the system font sizes every time I open the feed reader.
• OPML import: if it doesn’t have functional OPML import, I can’t use it.
• subscribe from browser: I’m getting too old to subscribe to feeds by editing a config file; I want to be able to click on the RSS link in my browser and have the Right Thing happen.

NICE BUT NOT MANDATORY:

• libre: would be nice, but am currently using a gratis-proprietary web service, so another gratis-proprietary app is a wash.
  • if proprietary: must have functional OPML export as well as import.
  • if libre: must have functional development team/model. I can’t put up a web service that I can’t trust to be secure, and that means active development. (As far as I can tell this rules out the otherwise interesting-looking gregarius- 18 months without release.) And must have low maintenance and fairly easy install. Think wordpress as the target here.
• web-based: unless it has a great mobile-phone mode, I’d effectively use it only as a desktop app anyway, so web-based is nice but not huge.
• remembers read/unread: I think this is optional (that is how I used to use things on planet, for example) but it might be mandatory, given my current reading style. This is definitely a big strike against planetplanet, for example, but if the other problems with planet were fixed (no starring, etc.) I might be able to live with it.

BONUS KILLER FEATURE:

• feature I haven’t seen anywhere¹ : I want to be able to mark a feed as a ‘meme source’, and not read it directly, but have the URLs it links to tracked, and if multiple meme sources start linking to the same URL, I want to see that URL. Sort of like techmeme, but with a personalized source list.

So, lazyweb: does such a thing exist? If it doesn’t, any web developers want to give a shot at building it? :)

1. except planet, but last time I checked planet lacked must haves like starred and subscribe from browser; it also doesn’t clean up after itself so I had hundreds of megs of log files sitting around, which sucked.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on February 09, 2008 (boomark / email).