Kerkia

Background

RSS feeds have become a prime source of information and dynamic news over the Internet. To read those news you typically subscribe to your favourite feeds and reads them at your leisure in a feeds reader.

There are various solutions to read those feeds. The first one is to use an online application that runs in your browser; this is rather powerful since feeds usually point to web-based articles you would prefer reading in your browser anyway. The second one is to use a desktop application; this is one more application to install and does not bring much more than a web-based application, but it has the distinct advantage of being available offline and making it easy for you to download the feeds content to your local computer. The last solution is to use an add-on to a web browser in order to add a good RSS reader to is, but we do not recommend this approach as have not found a good RSS reader extension to either IE, Firefox or Chrome.

Recommendation

Our top recommendation is to use Google Reader, a web-based application to read feeds. The interface is very easy to use and this has the advantage of making all of your feeds available on ay computer you use without any need for synchronization. Bloglines is another rather known alternative but, although the interface is fun to use and it has nice features to help discovering new feeds, we find it less efficient to use in the longer-term, and desktop feed readers do not synchronize to it.

Our second recommendation and for those of you who prefer a desktop application, we recommend RSS Bandit. It has improved substantially over the past couple of years, and a new GUI is in the work according to the authors. The interface is very nice and fully customizable, the feature set is rather complete, and it can synchronize to your Google Reader feeds as well, which is a must-have feature in our view. It can also sync with the Windows RSS platform feeds. We recommend it for the casual and not too demanding users.

Our last recommendation is FeedDemon, the famous RSS reader from NewsGator. This very famous RSS reader is very fast compared to RSS Bandit, and has a huge amount of features. With the latest addition of Google Reader synchronization, tagging, item sharing and twitter feed reading, it offers all of RSS Bandit features plus many more. We recommend it for the most advanced and demanding users.

Web links

Google Reader

Web site: http://www.google.com/reader

RSS Bandit

Web site: http://rssbandit.org/

Download: http://rssbandit.org/download/rss-bandit-download/

Feed Demon

Web site: http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/feeddemon/default.aspx

Download: http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/default.aspx