Eclectic Echoes

RSS Readers

I have been using — and loving — FeedDemon from Bradbury Software (the business identity of Nick Bradbury, the author of HomeSite and TopStyle as well), as my primary RSS feed reader since it entered a public beta a few months ago. As far as I am concerned it is hand’s down the best one available for Windows. I have tried a number of other readers prior to FeedDemon, none of which satisfied me enough to pay for. While I have not yet paid for FeedDemon (there is a 30 day trial period, which I have need to take advantage of until I can allocate more funds for software purchases), I am more than willing to pay a very reasonable $29.95 for it.

While I am enamoured of FeedDemon — it is constantly running on my main system — I recently learned of another Windows RSS reader. This one is free for home use, and works within Outlook XP or 2003. No, I still haven’t managed to abandon Outlook, although I have effectively abandoned the rest of the MS Office Suite as much for economic as philosophical reasons. The last RSS reader I tried within Outlook was, for me, an utter failure. It added far too much overhead, both CPU and memory, and drastically slowed Outlook when it tried to get more than 2 or 3 feeds. Annoyingly it opened any clicked links within Outlook (using the IE rendering engine) instead of sending it to Firebird as I much prefer. On top of that it significantly added to the memory footprint of Outlook even when it was not downloading or displaying any feeds. Even given all this, when I read a few reviews of intraVnews, I decided to give it a try.

I must say I am impressed. It does not appear to slow down Outlook much at all, and while I’m sure it does add to Outlook’s memory footprint, it appears to be minimal — although still a touch more than FeedDemon uses — and does not fluctuate much as it downloads and displays feeds. I must admit that I have so far only added 32 feeds to monitor in Outlook, but at this point that is 10 more feeds than I used in the prior Outlook based readers. As for the other complaints against prior Outlook based readers, those too are not especially present in intraVnews, although it is noticeably slower to refresh and download feeds than FeedDemon. There are many advantages to RSS feeds in Outlook, especially if you are an avid Outlook user. You can apply all the familiar filtering, organizational and search tools available in Outlook to feeds along with mail, contacts and such. You can also move/copy feed items to any folder, and generally do with any feed item the same things you can do with an email or note, including archiving feed items.

One especially nice item that is not directly related to intraVnews integration with Outlook is that in the properties for feeds you subscribe to you can select that a feed is a secure one and enter a user name and password. This is really nice. I currently have four feeds for which I am subscribed which are password protected, not because of subscription models or any such, two are alpha/beta software feeds, one is a collaboration project and one is a family web site which the maintainer / author does not want in the “general” public. While four sets of passwords (and user names) — invariably set by the site maintainer and using .htaccess passwords — is not too much to work with it is extremely useful to be able to enter the information into the feed properties once and be done with it. As more of these semi-private feeds are developed, and if the success of the four I am privy to are any indication there will be many more of these in the near future, this feature will become a requirement for a significant number of users. I would seriously like to see this in the next update or version of FeedDemon.

A screen grab of the Security Option for feeds from intraVnews.

On the down side — there are always tradeoffs of some sort — it does require Outlook to be open to use. For some users, such as my father, this is a non-issue as they use Outlook as their communications and internet hub as it were. I generally have Outlook open two or maybe three times a day and only for 15 to 20 minutes or so to gather and clear the email. However I generally leave FeedDemon available in the task bar all through the day, and often check it for interesting updates in my filtered categories. Currently in intraVnews 1.0 there are no tools to allow porting to a web site or blog from a viewed feed, the developers have it on the list of future developments, however. Again for many users this would be a non-issue, but for myself I like the option, even if I don’t always use it, of posting an item directly out of the feed reader as I can with FeedDemon. As I mentioned before it is, while not painfully so, noticeably slower than FeedDemon at downloading feeds. I imagine this is a result of working in the Outlook framework as all Outlook integrated readers have suffered the same way, though this one the least of them. One other nit, is that I could find no way to force a check of feeds for updates it runs on a schedule only. Apparently to force it to look for updated feeds off the schedule one would have to shutdown Outlook and restart it, or modify the schedule properties of the feed. This annoying point became a real hassle when I wanted to check my own RSS feeds after updating them but had to wait an hour for intraVnews to update according to schedule, while FeedDemon obediently went out and grabbed the updated feed, even though it was “off schedule”. This last sore spot as with the first two, for most users would probably be a non-issue.

One thing from a developer point of view that I don’t like is that intraVnews has an option to download all the html associated with a post. I tested it on this site and that slowed the download of the feed to a crawl. To me however this negates most of the benefits of RSS to a webmaster / author — namely to be able to widely publish the data, in a clean, reusable and ultimately lower bandwidth way. While I drop photo’s an full text into my feeds, they still remain far lower bandwidth than visiting the fairly well optimized site. Seems counter-productive to the ideas of RSS and RDF, at least as I understand them.

Personally, I have now gotten into the habit of having Outlook and Firebird closed most of the time, using FeedDemon to occasionally check news, sites and conversations that are important to me, only from there opening Firebird when I want to follow a link or get more information than is available in the feed — which is one reason I wish that all sites that offer feeds would offer a full content version as well as the usual short snippet feeds that are most common, best to my mind (although not implemented here yet) is the option of snippet, full post, and full post with comments feeds. For myself I will continue to use the excellent FeedDemon as my primary feed reader. Small footprint, minimal CPU usage, great features (including excellent organization, filter and search tools, which intraVnews has via Outlook) and great support all for a fair price. That alone says something considering my current cash inflow situation!

I will however continue to use intraVnews as well, at least based on my preliminary evaluation of it, primarily for the feeds that require password authentication, a few feeds for the archival ability, and also for a few other feeds which I find myself wanting available in Outlook anyways so that I can search the feeds and the related mail list messages together and be able to view the time line of communications. While these two programs may be competitors, they can obviously co-exist and even compliment each other in many ways, as they are partially aimed at slightly different, though overlapping, audiences.

For others asking me which feed reader to look at if they are only to choose one, I will first ask them if they use Outlook XP or 2003 heavily. If they do, like my father, I will recommend they take a serious look at both readers. Especially for someone, again like my father, who does not heavily rely on RSS feeds, the price(at least for home use, there is a license fee for business use) and clean integration of intraVnews into Outlook is very compelling. Otherwise, for my money the best solution is FeedDemon, although I hope Nick will add Secure Feed options to the feed properties soon.