We’ve been meaning to write an article about using RSS to read blogs including this one. It looks like NAR’s web wizard has beaten us to the punch. In their article on rss feeds. Its a good primer on what RSS is and what it does.
In the side bar on the main page of this blog, we’re not using the orange XML icon that was talked about in the web wizard article. Instead we have our entries and comments feeds marked by RSS icons. As you can guess by their titles, one is for the main content on the site, and the other one syndicates the comments that people leave. In my RSS reader I have both subscribed so I never miss a thing on CRT’s blog.
I’d like to mentioning a few more RSS aggregators you might want to try out.
For Windows users, there’s a .NET based one called RSS Bandit that I’ve heard great things about. Its free and licensed under an open source license. I’ve only used it briefly but it gets the job done and has a bunch of other nice features.
For Mac OS X users, I hear that NetNewsWire is the preferred choice. I haven’t used it, but its product page lists some nice features such as an embedded web browser and podcasting integration. They also have a freeware version called NetNewsWire Lite that is missing many of the advanced features, but is still usable.
On Linux, I’ve been using Liferea which fits my needs for now. Its not as advanced as the other two in many ways, but that’s okay for lean and mean loving me.
