Choosing a good RSS reader

I’m running out of RSS readers, in my quest to find something that Just Works, and Doesn’t Do Anything Stupid. I got close to giving up that such a thing exists, although I’ve finally found one that’s been working fine for a couple of weeks, so I think I may be OK. I was surprised quite how low the standard is.

Absolute requirements

1. It has to store state on a server

I use more than one computer (Shock! Horror!). The whole concept of an RSS reader application that you “install” on your local computer is frankly ridiculous. I’d be better off using my web browser and Del.icio.us bookmarks for every site I’m interested in – it would be the same level of functionality, only less hassle and more future proof. Wow.

2. It mustn’t suck at the basic task of “reading an RSS feed”

For instance, UNlike Google Reader, it must make it easy to:

• display only the unread articles
• optionally show read articles as well when needed
• mark articles as read only when you’ve actually read them
• read the “oldest article first”, not the newest

(GR can be configured to fix some of that, but the rest is forced upon you in a broken state, and if you want to fix it you’d have to re-write the interface using GreaseMonkey or similar. But at that point you’ve just made your own customized RSS reader!)

3. It mustn’t be absurdly greedy in bandwidth usage

At home, this doesn’t matter. However, when on the move (frequent) this really really really does matter: again, part of the point of using RSS in the first place is to be able to batch-download info once and once only, and to be friendly to my bank balance when using hotels which charge by the megabyte, or using an iPhone or similar (which, thanks to the network operators, charges by the megabyte everywhere in the world, unless you buy a new contract for each country you go to).

Bloglines and Google reader dump a tonne of traffic back and forth if I merely try to login to my account. That’s stupid. It also means I cannot afford (literally: this is expensive!) to use either of them when on the move. FAIL.

4. It must be cross-platform

See point 1. If it doesnt work equally well on Windows and OS X then it’s completely useless. If it doesn’t work equally well on linux then it’s a pain but bearable. It’s so pathetically easy for a web technology to work on everything (or to work on “Firefox”, say), that I’m not going to waste time with single-OS crap.

Onwards and upwards…

I’m now going through the desktop RSS readers one by one in the hope that one of them fulfils these basic criteria. I’ve given up on the web-based ones.

NetNewsWire is teh awesome

Throwing out anything that didn’t meet Requirement Number 1 above, I soon found one that seems to fulfil *all* of my core requirements above, but which also has some unexpected niceness:

• Add a new subscription is very efficient, just three keypresses – cmd-N, enter – because it prefills the feed URL box with any URL it finds in the clipboard!
• When you click on a link in a feed, it opens that link in a new tab; hit cmd-w when you’ve finished, and it jumps back to the feed-reading tab
• You can disable automatic synching, and just synch whenever you’re online in a place that’s cheap, using a nice easy to find great big “synch all” button

I’d tried NNW / NewsGator briefly in the past and couldn’t get them to work for me (a looong time ago), and I’d heard bad things about them. Whatever. They seem to work beautifully now.

I’ve encountered only two bugs so far. To understand the first one, you need to know what happens when you first install NNW. When you first startup, and create a NewsGator account, it forces you to take 10+ feeds you couldn’t care less about. You can delete them, but then as soon as it re-synchs with NG, it brings them back.

So, the two bugs:

• If you delete them all, and THEN go to preferences, and select Synching, then “Starting Over”, and “Replace subscriptions…”, it … fails. It gets the current NewsGator ones back again.
• It’s not reading a private password-protected, SSL-protected feed of mine. Could be a problem with the webserver auth, but it’s working fine in Firefox when going to the feed URL directly; I haven’t gone wading through error logs yet to see what’s going wrong

I had to do: “delete everything, replace subscriptions, check to see if its worked?, repeat” 3 times before the 10 zombie feeds from the first bug finally died the death they deserved. Minor annoyance, given I’ll never have to worry about it again :).

For the second bug … hopefully it’s not a bug, it’s my fault instead.