I've mentioned on a couple of occasions my desire to read RSS feeds tied to particular topics rather than particular people/blogs. The answer seems to be to subscribe to a feed of search results for that topic at a good RSS search tool. I've taken to subscribing to Feedster search results (which are available as an RSS feed) and using that to keep up on various topics that I'm intersted in ("mozilla," "mars," "astronomy," and "firebird," for example.)
I was lacking just two things to make this a really nice experience. First, I needed a clean and simple feed reader for Firebird. I'd tried NewsMonster which is just too big (and too featureful,) Aggreg8 which isn't quite finished enough and doesn't integrate well with Firebird, and ForumZilla which is also still in the very early stages. None of these really fit my minimal needs.
RSS Reader Panel to the rescue. It has a clean bookmark-based interface that integrates well into Firebird's sidebar, (it even has it's own toolbar button available in the customize palette) and uses the Firebird extension settings mechanism. It's just very sharp and very Firebird.
The second problem I have is that Feedster (unquestionably the best RSS search tool on the planet) only offers ten results in their search results RSS feed and this is insufficient for my needs where there are usually a few dozen new posts that match my search each time I run it. With the regular search I can specify up to 100 results per page but the RSS feed URL doesn't seem to accept the &limit=100 bit. Maybe the kind folks building this great tool will help me out :-)
Posted by asa at July 3, 2003 11:19 PMTry the almost stabile RSS Bandit 1.1 for Windows (http://www31.brinkster.com/rssbandit/). Not really minimal, since it requires .net framework and has a memory footprint of 45 Megs (!), but it works quite well. It has auto-feed discoverer and includes Feedster-search.
Posted by: Helmut on July 4, 2003 03:51 AMThe RSS Reader Panel would be better if it showed some kind of date information.
Posted by: Colin Ramsay on July 4, 2003 05:29 AMHelmut, I'd have to be running Windos to try that I guess. I'm not willing to regress the rest of my computing experience for an RSS reader ;-)
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on July 4, 2003 07:18 AMHi there,
Fixed ! Sorry about that. I did a dumb thing which is now fixed.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Best
Scott
Oh and RSS Reader Panel is actually quite nice. Out of curiousity is the source available for it so it can be improved?
Posted by: Scott Johnson on July 4, 2003 05:40 PMHow can something be too featureful? I don't really understand. I guess you are just looking for a quick page differential?
I guess the solution here would be to make NM work more like a simple feed reader but with the same functionality available.
Actually most of this is in the works for 1.1. I want to take some time and add better feed management. Make the package smaller... Respond faster, etc.
Kevin
Posted by: Kevin Burton on July 4, 2003 08:59 PMI am still trying to find a rss reader that suits my needs, and FeedDemon comes close. You can also set Watches for specific terms: all the feeds you're subscribed to will be searched for these terms. Maybe that's what you're looking for?
(one but: IE is used inside FD, while Newzcrawler lets you choose what browser to use))
The RSS Reader Panel is very nice indeed. You can place your links in folders under the main feed folder to organize them too.
Posted by: motobass on July 9, 2003 06:45 AM