I have always been a fan of RSS feeds going back years. In case you don't know, RSS feeds (and ATOM feeds) are text files that provide the latest pages from a website. I use them for News, website statuses and more.

I use a number of RSS feed readers on my Debian machine and wanted to highlight what I like about each one.

QuiteRSS

My main RSS feed reader, i like it, but it is a little slow to open and close. One small problem I have is that when i open it, it is always set to "ALWAYS ON TOP". Everytime I open QuiteRSS, i have to untick the "ALWAYS ON TOP" setting in the right click. I cannot find how this has been set in the settings/options panels. Maybe this is a feature I discovered in another window manager, as i used LXDE earlier. Any ideas how to unset this?

All round, i like QuiteRSS, it doesnt have a progress box to show downloads, something I would like to see as i often work with sporadic internet connections.

There is an ability to search within one feed, but thats not how I need to search.

One really annoying feature is if you click on the line between the news items in a feed, it decides to open in a browser. This also tends to open a new browser window, but as i am offline, it just gives an error page.

Another strange feature is that many articles are marked as read, even thou i havent had a chance to read the feeds. I tend to go to the wireless hotspot, download all the feeds and go back to my desk to read them. But they are often marked read.

I use QuiteRSS as my main feed reader, but am open to new ways. So i tried the following apps, but none quite did it for me!

Liferea

I like the way you can read the unread feeds across all the feeds in the app. This is how i have gone through the feeds, but it is a little unnerving when they disappear after you click on the next one. But i suppose this is now not unread!

I also liked the way there was a make folder option, QuiteRSS doesnt offer folders for the feeds, so they are all in one long list. The problem with Liferea is that any folder I make, doesn't actually appear.

Akregator

After finding a number of OPML files (rss backups) on github, I wanted to see what these feeds offered, but didnt want to clog up QuiteRSS or Liferea with other peoples feeds, so i used Akregator.

Akregator was quite minimal, but let me import 5 opml files with ease and read the feeds.

However, after shutting down Akregator (or so i thought) It seems to keep a background process running which created errors as i am offline a lot.

So now i dont use Akregator much as that background process wasnt what i wanted.

Newsboat

I installed a Command Line (CLI) to test out what RSS feeds were like from the command line. I imported my main opml file to give it a whirl, but on reopening the app after the first feed update, all the feeds were gone. So i gave up on that one.

Conclusion

I would be interested in any solutions to issues i have written about here. You can contact me via twitter If you can share your feeds via .OPML files I would love to see what you read.

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If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon