The rise of blogs and easily publishable content created a need for the ability to track it, hence the creation of Really Simple Syndicate Feeds or RSS for short. “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. RSS [...]
The rise of blogs and easily publishable content created a need for the ability to track it, hence the creation of Really Simple Syndicate Feeds or RSS for short.
“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”
These ’special programs’ and ‘filtered displays’ consist of either:
- Browser feeds
using a web browser to keep track of website updates (all modern browsers contain this functionality such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari) - A dedicated reader
These include Google Reader, FeedDemon and a host of others where you can read blog feeds as you do email. Some readers are online, others are desktop based. - An online aggregator
Such as AllTop or TechMeme. This lets an algorithm find out the most popular stories for the day and saves you the trouble of scouring countless blogs.
Whether you’re already a feed addict or just interested in the whole thing, deciding upon who you’re going to use may take some thought.
Online Reader? Desktop reader?
It all comes down to personal preference really, but if you really don’t know what you would prefer then you no longer have to worry. A perfect solution exists which means you can get all possible RSS functionalities through just one set of free products:
NewsGator Technologies.
NewsGator is a ’social computing’ company which develops widgets, enterprise intranets and social extranets. Essentially NewsGator is about facilitating communication between both employees and customers.
Initially NewsGator sold their RSS products and services but back at the start of this year developer Nick Bradbury made the decision to release NewsGator as a completely free service, potentially I guess to increase exposure to the rest of the NewsGator business.
Now when I say that this is the most complete set of RSS products available I really mean that. Just take at the complete list of products available:
(Toolbar | NewsFriends | Didja Hear!? | Desktop | FeedStation | Y! Messenger)
In fact the best way to demonstrate exactly how all this works together is with a flow chart:
As you can see, this is a incredibly diverse and featured set of products. You don’t have to be put off - there’s no way you’ll ever use all of these products together.
Start with NewsGator Online.
NewsGator Online is a web-based RSS Reader, similar to and main competitor of Google Reader.
On its own merit NewsGator Online would be hard pressed to compete with Google Reader as the sharing features are fairly basic when compared and I find the navigation a little clunky for an online service. It does have a decent Digg style ‘Recommended Stories’ homepage, but it’s too broad to be of interest to many users.
It’s a solid web-based service, but the real strength is in NewsGator Online being the ‘glue’ which holds all the various products and services together by synchronising feeds between different platforms, devices and applications quickly and efficiently.
Registering a free account gives you access to this service which you can start using immediately either from scratch or perhaps by importing feeds from another Feed Reader.
Now if you are going to use just the online RSS reader service there are a couple extra downloads which provide some useful tools and features. NewsGator Desktop does two main things:
- Provide notifications from the system tray as new items arrive in NewsGator Online
- Synchronise with Windows RSS feeds, works with Internet Explorer 7.
Additionally the NewsGator Toolbar is a helpful addition as it will search for feeds on a page, find out who else is linking to this page and best of all; let you take a ‘clip’ of a static which doesn’t have a RSS feed for monitoring.
If you prefer desktop applications to web-based services then you can use either FeedDemon for Windows or NetNewsWire for Mac OS, or both if that’s how you work.
Both provide fairly similar features and functions specially integrated into each platform.
FeedDemon 2.7 is perhaps the most fully featured desktop reader for Windows and presents feeds in either a familiar Outlook style interface or alternatively a Newspaper style, something developer Nick Bradbury recommends as the superior method.
Some standout features include the Panic Button which detects when you are overcome by unread feeds and offers to scan through, marking older items as ‘read’ and ‘Prefetching’ which automatically downloads items such as pictures, videos and links for offline reading. It also includes tabbed browsing and feed reports.
Perhaps best used in conjunction with a main desktop reader, NewsGator Inbox lets you keep watching your feeds at work, while looking like you are still working!
It looks like email and even acts like an email (you can forward posts along to other employees or friends), but it still synchronises with NewsGator Online. It includes most of the functionality of FeedDemon and NewsNetWire including podcast downloading, feed subscribing, clippings whilst having some unique features of its own such as integration with Windows Live Writer.
NetNewsWire 3.1 is an award winning Mac Reader. I haven’t used it myself being a Windows user, but based on its popularity and the reviews I’ve seen it sounds like a great application.
Some of the standouts seem to be the desktop integration between “Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl [and] Twitterrific”, podcast synchronisation to iTunes and the attractive and functional UI.
Now that you have a desktop feed reader setup (or alternatively just the web reader) and synchronising with NewsGator Online, you can download some extra tools to further enhance your experience.
NewsGator Go!
NewsGator Go! is how you can access, read and manage all of your feeds from any mobile device either by simply going to http://m.newsgator.com on your phone’s browser and logging in, or by downloading the dedicated applications for Windows Mobile, Blackberry devices or Java enabled devices.
With NewsGator Go! you can also email feeds to friends and if you use Windows Mobile then you play video or audio enclosures.
Alternatively for the iPhone owners amongst you, NewsGator released this application recently. Again, I haven’t used it, so if any of you have, let us know in the comments how you’ve found it!
Some features described are “one-click access to view news items in Safari” and clipping capabilities which allows offline (or out of range) browsing of feeds.
This really is just a very brief overview of many of the NewsGator services and applications. I could spend just as much time on one alone. For anyone who moves between various devices, locations and platforms this really is the best solution you could find to managing all your feeds together for no cost at all!
There is so much I haven’t covered here, and even whilst going through these tools myself to research this article I discovered 10 times more additional tools, features and services then I knew about originally.
I couldn’t recommend this set of services more.
(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.
More from MakeUseOf.com :
- MakeUseOf Directory : Read about up-to 5 truly useful web apps on a daily basis.
- MakeUseOf ‘Geeky Fun’: - Fun Geeky Pics, Cartoons and Videos.
No comments:
Post a Comment