RSS readers/aggregators

This weekend I somehow decided I needed to seriously start following a few blogs and RSS feeds and that I needed to find myself a RSS reader/aggregator. I was literally surprised at discovering that there are hundreds of them around (take a look here and here) and that some of the most popular are web based (see here and here). I downloaded all of the most popular client-based readers/aggregators and spent an entire afternoon playing around with them. I was surprised again at seeing how buggy most of them are and how some of them cannot correctly identify the presence of feeds inside an HTML page (either you provide the exact URL to the feed or they fail at picking it up in the page). I also noticed that most of them either don't display or don't display in a friendly manner comments made to blog posts. In the end I got to the conclusion that Omea Reader is probably the best one: it is feature rich and comments are not only displayed :-) but they are displayed intelligently using a TreeView with each comment being placed one level under the related post. Omea Reader requires the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 or higher to be installed on your client machine. BTW, I forgot to say that Omea Reader is also free.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2006
  DOGFOOD? I'm curoius why you are not using the new RSS Feature within Internet Explorer 7 ????
• Anonymous
  August 19, 2006
  For the simplest of reasons: because I (usually) look around myself before turning to obvious choices. I suppose this might not be a common approach to things.
• Anonymous
  August 19, 2006
  Ahhh . . . hence the name "Scattered Notes" as opposed to "Gathered Notes" (^_^)