A good news reader?
So is there actually a good news reader out there? I tried switching from Firefox Sage to something snazzier and I’ve been scorned twice now.
RSS Bandit is very pretty and has really nice management but you can’t tell how many comments are in a post using the UI. (this seems related to shoddy support/implementation of <slash :comments>).
RSSReader… I forget why I dumped RSSReader.
I’m swiching back to Sage. It’s silly though. I pull up a feed and then middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click all the entries to open them up. That seems ineffient or something but it works.
I’m happy with liferea.
looked into FeedReader, which is an open source Windows mirror of liferea. Thanks.
A vital feature that I’m not seeing in news readers is the ability to help me watch conversations. I see blog comments as conversations or (in online forum parlayance) threads. I want to be able to reply to a comment and then have the news reader keep watch for a furthering of that conversation. The only way to do that now is to bookmark the blog post and return at a later time. That’s not scalable at all.
The RSS standard doesn’t offer official support for anything like this. Here are some possible implementations
<comments>2</comments> – simply say how many comments there are.
<commenthash>123123</commenthash> – if the hash changes, you know the comments have changed. This catches if a comment is edited, or if one is added and another removed.
<comment>Comment text<comment> just push all the comments through xml and let the client sort them out. There’s a real danger of this not being a “lightweight” solution.
My blog uses the Subscribe to Comments plugin which solves this problem well in my special case but it won’t work for other situations.