I would like to introduce a new section of Royville TECH called, “Bryan’s Pick.” Bryan’s Pick is a usefull and time saving program that I recommend for anyone all ages that makes things in life a little easier.
People are once again aggregating their news, this time with RSS, a new, lightweight technology. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (depending on who you’re talking to). Either way, it’s an XML standard for syndicating content via the Internet. A site with an RSS URL is offering its content in XML so programs other than Web browsers can fetch and format it.
Now, more than ever, RSS is becoming so pouplar in blogs & news sites. FeedDemon makes it easy to gather and veiw the top headlines and new postings from your favorite sites.
PROS: What I like about FeedDemon is that it puts your “channels” or RSS feeds into categories and there are numerous presets in each category including Geek News Central in the Technology category. Big plug for them here. Also, if you have a blogroll that has the RSS feeds, you can export the OPML file and import it into FeedDemon, so it saves a lot of time.
CONS: I haven’t found any major bugs in the beta edition, suprisingly. I can’t really complain about quirks and weird stuff, since there is so much time left and it is still in beta, but I will anyways. I’m positive these things will be fixed by the final edition. The only think that I would like to see in the final edition is to mark all read in the “listing” or category not just the “channel” or RSS feed Nick proved me wrong :D. See it gets a little confusing. Here’s a sample: The RSS feed is placed in a category as the channel is placed in the listing. A little weird. Other than that, this program is flawless.
FeedDemon is a free download at 2.12MB currently in BETA. Check it out. That’s Bryan’s Pick for the week of June 30th. Next week, w.bloggar hits the spotlight and my review.
I have been using it for a few days now, and I can already tell its going to be my favorite of any newsreader I’ve tried :)
Another cool thing to point out about this software is that its from the same person who made TopStyle, a super CSS/HTML editor :)
Wow Nick! You sure know how to make a guy look dumb! :D Just kidding, hey- that review deserved it! It was 100% accurate (well, now it is) FeedDemon is a wonderfull program everyone and good luck! Let us know when it goes final.
Take care,
Bryan
Thanks for the great review, Bryan!
To mark an entire listing as read, just select “Mark listing as read” from the Listing menu. In general, actions that apply to current listing are in the Listing menu, actions that apply to the current channel are in the Channel menu, and those that apply to the selected news item are in the News menu.
This will hopefully be much clearer once documentation is available :)