RSS Aggregators on openSUSE 10.2
OK, so Christmas was great and everything. Presents and family, and honey-roasted ham… we spilled no fewer than 3 drinks on the dining-room floor that I personally mopped this very morning. No idea how many were spilled on the carpet. Much fun was had by all.
I also wanted to talk about RSS. This, to me, is the single greatest means of transmitting useful information that there is besides email. And maybe instant messenger.
Really briefly, RSS means “Really Simple Syndication”. It’s like a channel to which people can subscribe to receive the latest content on a given website. It is great for news, blogs, forum threads, or anything else that may be time-sensitive. You simply copy the URL of the RSS feed and paste it into an aggregator. This program then downloads and parses all of the RSS feeds to which you are subscribed. It may then give you ways to manage the articles, search through them, or whatever else. In any case, RSS is the man.
RSS feeds initially hit my scene around July of 2004. The first aggregator on my machine was RSSOwl. It had lots of great features but it seemed like it crashed a lot.
Akregator was the next RSS reader installed for trial. It seemed usable enough. There were a couple of bugs, which I reported, but overall, it was very usable. It fared much better than RSSOwl, but couldn’t filter things very well. What it does offer is the ability to search through the feeds, but does not allow one to save the searches for availability later. That annoys the snot out of me. It also does not allow direct filtration. Again, I need a box of Kleenexes. Overall, Akregator does seem quite a bit snappier and more responsive. It does all of the basics really well. It definitely misses some of the essentials, such as filters and saved searches.
I then learned that Thunderbird could aggregate RSS feeds, and would let me filter them into different folders, too. Ever since ths fact was discovered, my RSS feeds have been aggregated by nothing else. Thunderbird allows for import and export of the feeds in an OPML file (which most aggregators do now). Mostly, I appreciate it and use it because of its rule-based filters and its stability. Two huge beefs I have with Thunderbird: 1) It is slower than mold growing uphill in Winter. As we already know, waiting gives me cancer. And 2) When I have “Unread” selected in the filter bar at the top, and I go into a given folder containing feeds, it doesn’t only show the Unread news articles. It shows them all. Sometimes, I have to click around on different folders and come back to even show any at all, when I know darn well it’s full of them.
Thunderbird is agonizingly slow as an aggregator, and has some funky bugs that really shouldn’t be there. However, I do greatly like the filters.
I have also taken a look at Liferea. It has some excessively cool filtration, searching, and the ability to save searches as virtual folders. It is quite a bit more responsive than Thunderbird, but not quite as much so as Akregator. It is also quite unstable on a 64-bit machine, and crashed 4 times just tonight. Overall, I think it has the most of the features that I personally am looking for.
RSSOwl found its way onto my machine again, tonight. It seemed like it would be a good idea to see how far it had come in the last couple of years. To be honest, the stability had improved quite dramatically. RSSOwl had redeemed itself and had made quite a positive impression.
Unable to make up my mind, it was time for the old comparison spreadsheet trick. The first task was to come up with some criteria that were important to me personally. Next, a weight was given to the importance (to me) of each criterion. Having done that, I listed all of the aggregators that were to be tested.
We had a bullet-proof system (or something) for selecting the best aggregator.
Below is a graph with the results of my evaluations of each of the aggregators. In the first column is each of the criteria. In the next column is how important that particular criterion is to me personally. Then there are the individual aggregator columns. In the left column is my grade for that aggregator. In the right column is my grade multiplied by the weight. At the bottom of each column is the total score for each aggregator. The image links to a spreadsheet that you can download. If you want, you can adjust the importance of each criterion to see which aggregator may fit your needs the best.
I also checked to see how long it would take to start up. I instructed each aggregator to download all feeds upon startup. The startup times listed below thus include the time to start the application and download all RSS feeds.
As it appears that Liferea is my favorite RSS aggregator in terms of functionality, it is way too unstable for a 64-bit machine. Second most interesting to me is Thunderbird, which I have been using for about a year and a half. RSSOwl and Akregator are fine, but lack some necessary functionality, though they are both stabler and more responsive than Liferea and Thunderbird.
One of my very biggest problems is that I have about 150 RSS feeds to sort through. That is quite a bit of information overload. Hence the need for good saved searches or virtual folders.
Now for the big question: What slick little tips and tricks does anyone have to manage your RSS feeds, search through them, sort them, or otherwise optimize your experience? Any thoughts on managing the information overload?
I’m hoping that someday, someone will come out with Bayesian filtering for topics. That would be very helpful for me. In the meantime, please share your pointers.
December 26th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Check out netvibes.com. If you need to work on multiple machines, it’s great. Some people also love the google reader.
December 26th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Hi Scott,
I really like your blog and articles, and I respect the fact that you are entitled to express your opinions and feelings. Nevertheless, I also realise that words can hurt or offend, even when it’s not the intention. Therefore, I would really appreciate it if you would stop referring to cancer (or any other serious disease) in this manner? It gives me a very unsettling feeling, and I can imagine people that suffer from cancer or have to deal with its consequences are affected by your mentioning it as well. Thank you in advance for your consideration.
December 26th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Claire,
My sister died of cancer at 35, leaving 6 young kids behind. Other members of my family have had cancerous skin removed as well. I don’t mean to offend; instead it is my own way of dealing with it. Thanks for stopping by, though. Hope you had a great Christmas. 🙂
December 26th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Scott, latest liferea packages are available on my website/in my repository:
http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/suser-guru/rpm/packages/Network/liferea/
December 26th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
maybe i’m not a power user on rss reader. but netvibes.com is all i need.
the online reader just gets more feature and powerful everyday
i like the auto feed search feature and like all online rss readers, your feeds are always there 😉
150 feeds? ok i have like under 30…
the solution to information overload: just dont get overloaded, it’s your choice.
December 26th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Pascal,
Hey, thanks for stopping by. You know, the RPM I installed to check out liferea was from that exact location. How crazy. On my AMD64, any time I select anything in the help menu (except for ABOUT), liferea just disappears. Way strange. I really dig the program, I just need a little more stability. Thanks for coming by and have a good one.
December 26th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Hi Scott,
I’m very sorry to hear that about your late sister and wish you and your family all the best. My comment is based on the impact your reference to cancer had on me, and maybe I’m a bit emotional. It’s just that it kind of spoiled the fun of reading these two blog entries for me, especially since AFAICT cancer doesn’t have anything to do with openSUSE, aggregators or waiting. Anyway, I had a great Christmas, thank you. And I hope you did as will. Keep up the good work, I really like your blog 🙂
December 26th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I use Opera as a browser and rss reader and haven’t found a rss reader that made me consider changing. I follow 100+ feeds and haven’t felt that there was any issue with slowness, actually I think it’s pretty fast.
December 26th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Claire,
Apologies to have made your day worse instead of better. 😐 I’ll do better. Promise.
Our Christmas was great.
Thanks for stopping by. Glad you enjoy it.
December 26th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Bill,
Opera, huh? I will have to give it a go and see what I think. Good suggestion. Thanks.
December 26th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Hi Scott,
I’ve tried most of the aggregator that you’ve mentioned, some time back and eventually got used to Google Reader.
🙂
December 26th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
I stopped using Akegregator in favor of Bloglines.
http://www.bloglines.com
You can get to it from any machine and it’s reasonably fast (part of ask.com).
OK, Thanks Scott.
–Dietrich
December 27th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Hey, the one good thing about liferea that I like (though I personally prefer Akregator for it’s always iconified and on simpleness) is that it works with beagle. To be honest, I haven’t used KDE for a while so Akgregator may also do this now, but as far as searching goes, you can’t get much better than that. I’m gonna have to change back to KDE some time, Gnome on SLED is just way too slow! (Even on a Core 2 Duo).
December 28th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Right on, those are some sweet suggestions. 🙂 Thanks!
December 29th, 2006 at 12:41 am
Hi!
Two things: Liferea version 1.2.0 had a bug that prevented you to open the internal help (fixed in 1.2.1) and on x86_64 it is crashing for unknown reason (symptoms indicate a memory corruption). I’m unable to find the cause without having own 64bit HW and until now there was nobody willing to seriously debug this on his own.
December 29th, 2006 at 1:36 am
I’ve not really got into RSS yet. I use Klipfolio for Windows but not exactly scratching my itch. Did not realize Opera did RSS, I’ll have to look at that. I really like Opera’s text to speech features but only available in Windows.
Nice article, I’ll have to play with RSS farther, good suggestions on the comments too.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Lars,
I really dig Liferea, man. I am afraid I can’t be of much help with the 64-bit debugging, though. Maybe I’ll take a look at 1.2.1, though.
January 11th, 2007 at 7:26 am
I’m using Opera for reading about 60 feeds, works okay for me. Just wanted to tell opera also supports autolearning filters (or folders if you want). I believe they use a bayesian approach for that. Wouldn’t know if it works well on rss .. 🙂