Overview

Now, it is with some chagrin that I admit I didn’t cotton to rss/atom/other feeds until earlier this year. When Google released its Google Reader, I played around with it, since I tend to check out most of their toys anyway.

Well.

Whether you’re a geek like me or not, it’s worth learning how to use feeds. And yet, since I brushed them off and didn’t even consider their utility for some time, I’m writing up about them here to clarify why they’re so handy and how they can be used.

There’s two concepts to cover here. First is the feed itself. Although I see them called “RSS” or “Atom” or “subscriptions” and so on, technically they’re just “feeds” — rss, atom, xml, etc are different formats for the feed. Think of a feed as a broadcast of a web page. Instead of a user going TO a webpage, a user looks at a broadcast FROM the webpage. What’s the distinction? I can tell all the particular feeds I’m interested to come to a single place (i.e., aggregate) and I can then read them in that place, all together. Since any kind of webpage can broadcast a feed, there are feeds available for blogs, online news sites, photo sites, podcasts, and even video blogs (known by the awful “vlogs” contraction). Since most blogging software comes bundled with setups for feed broadcasts, chances are a blog I find interesting I can add to my collection of feeds.

Which brings me to the second part, the feed reader (or feed aggregator). A feed reader will take my list of feeds (or my subscription list) and fetch their latest broadcasts and then present them to me. The resulting presentation will not look like the original website pages but are instead a simplified layout. I can even opt for synopsis rather than full articles. I actually find this simplification to be a blessing in many cases; not only to avoid some horrible layouts or clashing colours or lots of adbling, but also with a standardized reader layout I can concentrate more on the content of what I’m reading. Depending on the particlar feed reader, I can browse through lists of the subscriptions, lists of their currently unread articles (by title or by title and synopsys), or at the unread contents. The exact options and layout varies by reader, of course. In some cases, only a synopsis is actually broadcast. In other cases, everything is sent, down to images used for the particular article, and I can choose whether to display these as a synopsis or in their entirety. Which I can choose to do therefore also depends on the sort of information the feed contains.

To give a scenario: I have a collection of subscriptions to daily comic strip publications. So I group these subscriptions into a single folder or group (also called outlines or tags or categories, etc). I also mark them for full display. Now when I choose to see my comics subscriptions, I get a single page with all of the latest comic strip publications laid out one after the other. I can just browse this single page, reading nothing but the exact comic strips I want. It’s better than the newspaper comic page!

There’s a fairly dry summary here and a bit more of an interesting summary here, especially in the Usage and History sections.

Readers

There’s tons of readers out there out there, including Bloglines, Google Reader, GritWire, NewsAlloy, Rojo, to name just a few. I restrict my attention here to those that are free or open source and web based. The reason is simple: I am online from a variety of different computers (and even platforms) and I want to be able to read from any of those with very little effort. Lazy, remember

There are also plenty of programs that I could install in Linux (or Windows, or Mac, or even Palm OS, &c.) but I dislike these personally because again, I work off of multiple computers and platforms and I don’t want to have my data stuck on one computer or have to learn multiple interfaces. (I’m soooo picky!) Nevertheless, one of these options might be better for someone else in terms of the additional features, speed, or flexibility offered. In that case a quick list of open source feed readers I googled up include:

Sage: firefox extension
RSS Owl: multiplatform
Straw: Gnome/linux
Liferea: Gnome/linux
Blam: Gnome/linux
RSS Bandit: Windows
Vienna: Mac
Pheeder: Mac
Shrook: Mac freeware, but looks v interesting
Pluck: browser (IE/FF) based

Reviews

I considered the following criteria (in no particular order):

• any API or similar offering
• The granularity of privacy settings
• Extent of options for controlling how the feeds are viewed
• Extent of ability to organize feeds, including categorization, labelling or tagging, etc
• ability to import and export OPML files (xml-based subscription lists)
• extent/utility of helpfiles
• And finally a rather subjective “look and feel”: layout, usability, ease of finding things, etc. Different people will naturally come to different conclusions but that’s okay, I will inflict my own opinions anyway.

Some other issues that could be of interest but I didn’t really explore fully include the extent of the “social” aspect offered by the service, the ability to tag or share contents, and so on.

Bloglines

Bloglines has a lot going for it. The interface is simple and easy to use, it has a small API to work with, and it will import and export OPML (see below) files with no problems. I like to have their bookmarklet along the top of my browser to pick up subscriptions as I’m browsing. I can organize subscriptions into folders, and I can make either folders or individual subscriptions public or private (although anything within a private folder will be private also). If a particular feed allows, I can set it to show either a summary or the full article. I can mark articles unread to come back to later if I wish. I can click on a folder and get all the latest articles from the subscriptions in it on one page, or I can open the folder and be more selective about what I show. The helpfiles are useful and I can generally figure out what to do pretty quickly from those. Whenever I’ve had problems where I’ve written to support, I’ve gotten replies that were prompt and helpful. My only detraction here is that the site uses frames which makes me wince every time I think about it. I’m really hoping they have a site overhaul in the works. But I can otherwise recommend this one without hesitation.

Google Reader

Well, I’d have to say this is one of Google’s more disappointing offers. To begin with I cannot make sense of their interface. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to organize incoming new articles. Reader just serves them up as they appear, across all the subscriptions. On the reader page, there is a left sidebar with all the incoming articles from the subscriptions, ordered by date of arrival. I have not found a good way to order it in any other way, which is extremely frustrating. Otherwise the visual layout isn’t bad: the article that is being displayed in the main panel is linked up with its short listing in the left sidebar. There’s buttons to go to the top of the list, to move up or down or to refresh the feed. I have jumbled memories of wondering where the hell each article was from and a general whiplash sensation from having a humor article followed by a political one, followed by techie stuff and so on. It’s not obvious, but I found if I “edited” the subscriptions (which are themselves listed in alphabetical order), I could then at least see all the new ones in that subscription. Plus, individual subscriptions may be labelled (aka tagged) and I can choose to see a set of subscriptions with the same tag. But it was very difficult to maintain a sense of where I was. I do have friends who like Reader, so this may well be a personal preference thing. I can use a bookmarklet for subscriptions in the same way as Bloglines. New additions since I last tried it: there are provisions for sharing specified labelled groups of subscriptions and it’s now possible to import/export OPML files. There are some helpfiles and a Reader blog to keep users informed of upcoming changes. Still in all, the layout is pretty nice, and if there were a way to organize the incoming articles that made sense to me, I’d prefer its look and feel to Bloglines. As with any of their other offerings, using this requires a google account (a gmail account is sufficient).

Technorati

I hesitate to call Technorati a “reader” as it’s really quite a bit more, but quite frankly until my coworker clued me in I didn’t realize it could also be utilized as a reader. Off I went to my technorati account, and indeed, the “Favorites” option does just that. There’s an import option on the My Favorites initial page, and it snarfs my export file right up (while providing handy tips on how to create the OPML file in the first place from a handful of popular readers). The results were a bit mixed though: and on investigation, it looks like Technorati restricts itself to blogs that register with it. So of my 150+ subscriptions, it only recognized 32 of them. In addition, it treats the outlines (groups or foldernames in the OPML file) as tags, so one folder of mine called “daily morning” got rendered as three tags: “daily”, “morning”, and “daily morning”. Only the first two had the set of subscriptions under the original folder. So unless I only wanted feeds of blogs, I’m not sure I’d use Technorati for my main feed reader, although it seems there could be a number of ways to use this including creating ad-in export lists of particular blogs I found here. As far as the layout goes, I can toggle between “Posts from Favorites” and “Blogs from Favorites”. Technorati does offer a “FavWidget” which displays the last three posts from the favorites list that can be used outside of the site, such as in a blog. It uses iframe which should work when dropped into anything allowing the JS etc to work. Technorati is all about searching and finding things in the blogs and such, and it does not offer any privacy on the “favorites” list.

24 Eyes

This one’s an interesting feed aggregator. It’s a free web based reader, and there’s no need for creating an account because it keeps this information in cookies, which is a poor choice: as a FireFox user, I clear out my cookies each time I shut my browser down, so I lose all my setup each time, which renders this an exercise in futility. This service should at least offer an account option to get around that issue. 24 Eyes manages to cram-pack the screen full of feeds and such. When I go to its homepage, I’ve got pre-selected choices among a number of topics tabbed along the top, selecting one gives me a nine-box layout, one for each subscription, with a scrollable list of headlines under each; clicking on the headline gives me a quick synopsis and the option to open it (pops up original article in new window), save it, email it, or tag it. It’s pretty cool: I can play around with the layout by closing, minimizing, dragndropping, or creating boxes (called windows). I can choose the extent of info shown in each box. The tabs along the top can be deleted, renamed, or new ones added. There’s a pretty extensive search feature available there, plus I could add my own feeds. I chose “open feed”, and entered my blog’s feed and it came right up (including the images I added to my feed with my plugin!). However, I wasn’t able to import an OPML file. It seems to be aware of them: there’s an option for importing “catalogs” but I could not find a way to specify the imported file on my desktop: I was only able to choose between one of its own catalogs, or to enter a URL. However, for this to be a viable option, the user has to leave cookies from this site alone (there’s a FF extension called CookieCuller that would accomplish this if I otherwise wanted to continue with my cookie-clearing habits).

Squeet

Squeet was a very interesting variation on this theme. They offer both publishing services (see that and Feedburner, below) besides the usual reading services. But here’s the twist: my feeds will be sent to me via email. My account is based on the email address (which is quickly verified) I give them. Once I’m in, I’m given an option of choosing from among a set of feeds to start out. I skipped this and the next page was the Manage Feed page, in which the top panel allowed me to add feeds, either individually or by importing an OPML file, and the bottom panel listed the current subscriptions and their settings. Each subscription has a variety of possible settings: html or plain text; frequency (live, daily, weekly, or manually); if weekly, then the day can be set; if not live, the time can be set. So in other words, a particular feed can be sent to me dressed up in html, once a week on Mondays at 8am. Another one could be sent text only in “live” mode (that is, sent as soon as the new feed comes in). Given that LifeHacker has published a number of articles on how productivity-draining it is to be interrupted both by frequent feed and email arrivals, this sounds like a very nice way for busy individuals to precisely manage their feedreadings to reduce interruption. I uploaded my personal OPML and looked at the incoming email (yes, without quite considering what the volume would be — ah well). The emails sent by Squeet are nicely set up, uncluttered, but with relevant and helpful links back to the original article, the original feed, the Squeet account, and to “Buzz” articles I like. Squeet will list articles (not feeds) based on the number of “buzzes” generated so that I can browse around and see what’s popular. This is just a simple vote system, no tagging, etc. Under the Reader window, the Download option lists a number of extensions (IE6, IE7, FF, Google Toolbar) that make it easy to subscribe to new feeds via Squeet. Importing and exporting OPML files are trivial, and the helpfiles look nicely done, with illustrations. They’ve also got a blog to keep users updated on general information about Squeet, new features, etc. One last useful feature: I discovered I could pause the account (once I realized the volume of mail I had generated for myself) which is handy for going on vacation. There’s a little calendar tool off that to help choose the right date. I’m not sure if feeds are saved for my return or if they are tossed in the intervale. I can also cancel the account, which drops all the subscriptions. However, the account itself still exists — I signed back on and got a page that asked if I wanted to reactivate. I got my account back, emptied out of all subscriptions. Individual subscriptions can also be indefinitely paused or restarted, also convenient (but not when I’m trying to pause each one of 150 subscriptions until I discover the mass pause/cancel feature!)

Gritwire

Well, my first grump is at the entry window being a flash image especially since I block flash (thanks to FF extension Flashblock for reducing adbling). Setting that aside, once I create an account here, I’m presented with a basic page that has the subscriptions on the left with the chosen subscription set appearing listed on the right. It’s all very “web2.0″ ish and looks sharp, but it’s all accomplished with flash. At the top of the left panel are two options: add and configure. The add lets me add subscriptions by specifying an OPML file or by specifying an individual feed. It also lets me add new folders for organizing my subscriptions. The configure option allows management of the subscriptions which includes deleting folders, adding new ones, adding new feeds, exporting feeds. Sometimes it lists all the folders that appear on the sidebar (eg, after I deleted an extra folder) and other times it does not (when coming into it initially, it only sees to list those folders added by the user). The settings part is pretty minimal allowing the use of scrollbars or arrows, etc for navigation. Otherwise the functionality is very much like Bloglines: the folder highlighted on the left generates the list of feeds on the right. However the right panel lists the available items by title on top, and the selected titles appear in full on the bottom, which is a nicer way of navigating through. I imported my OPML without a hitch, and it was one of the few to preserve my folder names and organization from my original Bloglines export file. While I liked the interface considerably (ignoring the flash factor), there’s a few burps: the images coming in on specific articles seem to float around from their original positions. In particular my smilies seem to wind up on the left of the display which is a little odd. It also seems to have a little bit of an issue displaying properly if there are lists in the output — issues that other feed readers don’t have with the same article. But back to the flash: a consequence of the flashbling on this site: many of the links displayed are actually handled through flash, so my habit of right clicking on links to force them to pop out in a new tabdoesn’t work. This may not bother some people, but this winds up being a personal deal breaker. For those who complete a full profile, there’s “friending” abilities, and such. I can’t find any help buttons per se, but the layout’s pretty easy to use.

Livejournal

I wouldn’t recommend using Livejournal for rss feeds per se unless I was already using Livejournal and wanted to integrate it. Livejournal provides a way to specify a feed (”syndication”) as if it were a “friend” which I can then add to my friend list. The trick at this point is to edit the custom friends groups in order to segregate “live” friends from “syndicated” friends and then to read friends lists based on the groups. I helped set this up for a friend of mine, and it seems to me this could be a pretty nice option for learning a bit about feeds for the first time in an environment that one was already familiar with. However, one major limitation it has is that all incoming updates are fed as they come in so ordering can be tricky. This can be overcome by creating groups of friends as if they were labels and going that route, although I think if anyone’s reading that many feeds at this point and it’s getting that complex, it’s time to be reading this article for a better alternative . However, it has one particularly useful application, which is to grab a “friend’s” blog into the friend list when that friend’s blog is not on Livejournal. Obviously those entries can’t take comments, and the friend in question would need some method of doing the same to the LJ blog (although that’s easy enough since feeds are available for public LJ posts), but it’s a marvelous way to keep up with all friends’ posting in one spot for an LJ’er.

NewsAlloy

This reader is a bit like Gritwire, only instead of being Flashed into oblivion, it’s Javascripted into oblivion to the point of no real links existing anywhere and hence my aforementioned right clicking is again useless. Moving right along, the entry page is pretty standard: left sidebar options and main right side panel activity. On the left are folders/shortcuts, “channels”, and a tag cloud. The main panel has a search bar along the top, and then options for News, Subscription, Settings, Account, Feedback, and Feed Directory. Choosing the subscribe, there’s an import option which went smoothly and also understood the “outlines” (from the OPML) to help organize the subs. The place is sprinkled with little ?’s which provide help. It can be a little slow loading the info, but the helpfiles seem useful. Channels are basically groups of subscriptions. The inbox folder contains all the unread items (as they came in) and items can be “pinned”. There’s also an archive folder which appears to be all articles ever from the list of subscriptions. It’s not entirely clear how pinning is different from archiving. Articles can be rated which appears to be a simple vote, or tagged. When viewing articles, they are listed by title, and can be expanded. The interface is pretty nice and well thought out and it’s easy to figure everything out. The heavily javascript interface, though, is a potential problem for folks who limit javascript in their browsers and that kind of thing. It’s not explained, but apparently the inbox folder must be selected before clicking on an item in the channel in order to view that subscriptions currently unread items. If archive is selected then clicking on a channel will show those items already read. Pinning is a collection of articles from any feed that are grouped together for reviewing later. The folders and the channels can be used to filter each other: if I want to know which items in a particular channel I’ve pinned, I choose the pinned folder and then choose the channel of interest. If I’ve selected only my channels and choose from the tag cloud, I’ll find those items so tagged in my channel; select all channels and I’ll see all articles so tagged. This site’s sidebar has a nice way of filtering through articles by selecting among folders/channels/tags. If only the javascript didn’t get in the way (I hear there’s a Greasemonkey script for dealing with that, wonder how that’d work there.) It has a simple API for retrieving info, plus when I emailed and inquired about more info, the response was very prompt, within the hour or so, which was impressive. I do like the look of this site, and I like the general thought. I just don’t like losing my link functionality!

Rojo

Rojo has a mildly annoying signup process which included trying to pack my new account with as many subscriptions as possible (in part by asking for my zipcode), and trying to set up message to send to my “contacts” but it’s possible to break out of the setup wizard with the link in the lower right. The main page serves up options along the top with a left sidebar composed of a tag cloud, and articles by title. When in the top stories mode, it serves up the most popular articles (and feeds are themselves available for these streams). Choosing “Firefox” from the tag cloud got me all the top stories as tagged within Rojo on Firefox with an optional feed of this available; unfortunately I could not actually find its feed file in order to try dropping it into, say, a Bloglines folder, but it seems like it should be possible (I wonder what such a subscription would look like in Rojo’s export file). Moving on to the My Feeds page, there’s an edit/add in the sidebar now, and the add offers import/export options. I might have hit a speed bump; the first time I tried to import my OPML file, it wound up sitting on a blank page with “done” in the bottom, and poking around showed only about half had been loaded in. But on the second try it only took a few seconds. Now the My Feed page shows my feeds in the left sidebar, organized by folder. I can view all, or by folder, or by individual subscription. Now, Rojo manages to get the layout right while preserving link functionality. In other words this looks like intelligently applied JS. I like this one… It’s got a snappy red and blue layout and a nice use of tagging which I can view site wide or only to my feeds. Rojo offers privacy options, but unfortunately applicable to the entire set of subscriptions and not also by folder or by subscription. This site is a little more strongly socially oriented, as I can have friends-only sharing, etc. Each article can be voted on and/or tagged. I don’t see an API, though I wrote and asked them about it, so I’ll also see how long they take to get back to me. Each article is listed by title, with various options, can pop the article open or closed with the plus button. It has a clean rendering of the feed contents and it’s easy to quickly distinguish between what has been read (black) and what has not been read (red). Articles are shown from oldest to newest which is a bit odd when starting up a new subscription but seems to be reasonable after that, although most other readers put the newest arrivals on the top, generally.

Rezzibo

I mention this one mostly because I could not resist a Spanish language one. I’m pretty good at Spanish, but I never talk shop with anyone in Spanish so my Spanish “computerese” is practically nonexistent. Sites like these help me brush up . Registration is free. The interface is simple and direct: once I’m in, there is a panel for adding subscriptions, where I can specify the feed, a region of interest, a category, and any tags or key words I wish to associate with that. At the bottom is an option to import an OPML file. I found this site the most simple to work with, with the options I wanted directly laid out and not hidden in menus or even under the site’s own jargon (still trying to figure out 24 eyes’s “catalogs”). The main panel is “My subscriptions” and after importing my file, it listed them all in alphabetic order. Each subscription is presented with its name (linked back to the original site), a choice to enter and read the feed, a choice to recommend it, or to remove the feed. (Need to find out how to go from which to which, I wound up in different places unexpectedly). I can save info about myself, including my delicious directory. Once all the feeds are established, there’s a simple interface for reading them, the left panel lists my subscriptions and how many are unread; clicking on it presents the articles on the right, nicely formatted. The site has rough spots — it’s a little tricky to navigate around and it’s not always obvious how to get to one place from another. But each page is nicely set up and very usable. There’s some interesting touches such as offering the option to look at the feed source, a nice way to bounce back and forth between the articles and listings by titles. After specifying my delicious account, there’s a little delicious bookmark offered after each displayed article. Actually the more I look at this one the more I like it. It’s in beta, and I don’t see an API yet. It’s nominally social; I can mark feeds as “recommended” and browse through other feeds recommended by other users. Some possible bugs: I imported my OPML file, but I’m not sure it got all of them but there could be a size restriction being that it’s beta (real beta, not google beta). I also didn’t spot an obvious way to export OPML (which would let me quickly check the question of whether the import went as expected). In addition it does not automatically mark articles as read: I had to explicitly click on buttons for marking as read.

Additional utilities

Most of the readers I reviewed offer “OPML feed lists.” This is basically a fancy XML-ized list of feed subscriptions. With this, I can export and import my subscription lists between readers. I would say that it’s pretty important to choose a reader that is able to do this (one of the several reasons I did not initially stick with Google Reader although that is now fixed) because it allows me to change readers if I find something more suitable for my needs. I can also save off the OPML files as a way of backing up my subscription lists. (I back up all my online content — probably a subject for a future article.)

Finding feeds for the pages I’m interested in is pretty simple, especially with the newer browsers. Firefox, IE7 (and I believe XPSP2-patched IE6’s), Opera all offer ways of notifying that a feed is available, eg a Feeds are usually offered for regularly updated contents, such as news based webpages or blogs. Otherwise the page itself will have one or more of several icons to notify me of available feed subscriptions. Many of the online readers also offered searchable subscription lists and user defined tags or rated subscriptions to browse through, as well, if I’m looking for feeds on particular subjects. Probably the best known of these is Feedster which is an excellent starting point for searching or browsing for potentially interesting feeds. It also offers are feeds of its searches. Let me illustrate: I have a sudden need to track what articles are being published about panda bears. I’m not looking for a particular blog or newspaper or whatever, I’m interested in a particular topic. So I can head to Feedster, type in “panda bear” in the search box and get a set of results. If they’re to my liking, I can subscribe to that search to keep track of what is being published under these search terms. (That’s what I was hoping to do with Rojo’s tagged searches, and it may well be possible and I simply didn’t discover how to do it while playing around with that).

There really isn’t any restriction on the sort of information that can be sent this way. Weather information, music playing lists, and so on are also popular uses. In addition, dynamic lists of links can be generated from a collected set of feeds, which is exactly the premise behind my BloglinesBlogroll plugin.

Also, Feedburner is worth a mention here. What this service does is create feeds for a particular site, but then also maintains statistics and other information about those feeds. There’s a lot of potential information to be had here, and there are a couple of plugins for Wordpress, MovableType, etc, folks to tie their feeds through Feedburner. It also has facilities for dealing with the syndication of podcasts and other non-text media.

As I previously mentioned, Squeet also offers a similar service for publishing, although I haven’t seen any plugins or other utilities to facilitate that process. In addition, Squeet provides a means for it to deliver feeds that it publishes as email subscriptions. So I could, for example, set this blog up with a feed publication at Squeet, and then add a “subscribe by email” button to my site and be done with it. I get this cute little button:

And the fun part is the subscriber has all the options Squeet offers, including frequency and timing of the emails.

Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder allows me to create feeds from sites that do not actually provide feeds (yes there are still some around). A similar service is FeedYes; of the two I thought Ponyfish was smarter about creating a proper feed. I tested each with a particular site I enjoy but which publishes rarely, so it’s hard for me to keep up with it since I forget to visit it. Each of them went through a sequence designed to figure out what’s important and what’s not in watching for changes to the site in question. FeedYes came up with some false positives, but Ponyfish’s result looked just as I would expect if the site did have a feed. Both services have the option of account creation, but specific feeds can be created with or without an account.

OK. Go forth and read!