The Quest for RSS

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Published on Monday, 14 January 2008 16:49
Written by Matt Neimeyer

One of the "new" technologies that I'm really a fan of is RSS. It really fits into my overall view of tech where I might spend time to get it set up right. In fact, more time than would take to just do it, on the basis that in the long run I will save time.

Now for those that don't know what RSS is it stands for (at least one interpretation) Really Simple Syndication. The concept is that a special web page exists which either includes links snippets of content or links to other content. Then you have an RSS reader that subscribes to the RSS feed and checks that page every so often and pulls down that content (or the linked content). A practical example more people might be familiar with is the concept of PodCasting. A PodCast is nothing more than an RSS feed where the linked content is an audio or video file. In iTunes for example, you can easy subscribe to podcasts by going to the PodCast section of the iTunes store.

So where is all this going? Well I'm getting annoyed with my current RSS reader. I use Thunderbird because, for two basic reasons. First, is that it gives you the option of fetching basically the whole content right off the bat. For example, if you go to http://www.theregister.co.uk/software/apps/headlines.atom you will see short snippets of news articles on The Register (a GREAT news site in the UK. They have better US news than the US media.) When I plug that link into Thunderbird I see each article in full as if I went to the Register's site directly. The second reason I like Thunderbird is that it treats each item in the feed the way it treats email. Each one is a distinct separate item. I can read, save, sort, etc each individual article in the feed. Going back to my first paragraph I love that my favorite sites end up in my inbox as whole web pages to read, or delete, etc.

That said... Thunderbird is a bit clunky... so I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good RSS reader that doesn't treat each feed as a "stream" but rather a collection of individual items. For example, in Google Reader I can plug in the RSS feed for this blog and I end up with roughly 14 items in the reader. Let's say I mark 13 as read and want to keep the 14th. Nothing happens. I don't have a way to create a folder and say I'll keep this one about RSS for later reading. I don't have a way to "delete" the other 13 articles to clean up real estate... I just see that I have 14 articles in the feed. This is REALLY annoying to me. I don't want to read the feed. I want to read, work with, collect, etc the items IN the feed.

From my experimentation, the other big market share holder FeedDemon does the same thing. You read the feed itself and not in it. Ah well... But if anyone knows of anything I could try, please let me know