can't decide which reader

By basd on Nov 12, 2008 | In rss

I read a lot of rss feeds and I can't latch onto a feed reader that makes me 100% satisfied.

Mostly I'm using akregator, since it resides in the tray and notifies of new entries. I don't like the embedded reader, though (mostly because I am so used to Adblock stripping off the ads) -- but I discovered the default "left click" can be changed to open the item in the external browser.

TikiWiki has an rss feature which I sort of like because I can embed feeds on pages I set up myself. Additionally, it lets my feeds reside "in the cloud". BUT, it seemingly won't reed feedburner feeds, which eliminates TalkingPointsMemo and other feeds I read regularly. So, I've started looking at what it would take to write my own php feed parser. I looked at a couple of open source packages, but they weren't compact enough for the way I want to browse the feeds. Maybe I can borrow some code so I don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I set up "Sage" in Firefox and there are some things I like about it, but I don't think it autochecks the feeds.

I set up Google Reader. I was getting rather annoyed that the feeds seemed to "re-set" -- that is, feeds I had already marked as "read" seemed to keep reappearing. I also felt the Google Reader was pretty slow.

However, the feed "re-set" may be a problem with certain news services such as Google news feed and not the reader itself. I tossed the Google news feed from my other readers as well, because it just wastes too much of my time sending me the exact same headlines I have already previewed. Apparently, Google regularly updates the same stories in the feed, so the reader thinks they are new entries. This is particularly annoying, as many of the stories are of low interest.