Recently I added a plugin named Sociable to another weblog. While perusing the blog of Sociable’s developer, one post caught my attention. Peter Harkins asked his readers if they could recommend a good feedreader for Linux. Unfortunately, not having yet made the switch to Linux on our personal machines, it’s not possible to fully answer his question from the perspective of that operating system.
Recently I looked around for a newer feedreader for Win98SE, either one that runs under Firefox as an extension, or as a standalone program similar to FeedReader, and had some success. After finding some that didn’t work quite in the desired way, and others that had promise but unfortunately were still quite buggy, what I eventually settled upon was BottomFeeder, a standalone cross-platform Atom and RSS reader. It appears open-source and released under an Artistic License.
From the BottomFeeder front page:
“BottomFeeder runs on Linux x86, (also FreeBSD), PowerPC Linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP/CE 4), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X (PPC), AIX, SGI Irix, HP-UX, and Solaris (SPARC and x86).”
I have no intention of critiquing the program, as they all seem to have shortcomings and strengths of one kind or another; in the case of BottomFeeder, its feature set is impressive. This may imply it isn’t the simplest feed reader out there. I’m currently watching just under 100 feeds and have noted no big issues, but then I’m a simplistic user with basic needs who has always been attracted to the usefulness of powerware.
While it’s not perfect, you might like it — try BottomFeeder.
Hey there. I got bored and did some egosurfing and saw this post. I’ve been using liferea and am pretty happy with it.
Hi Peter, thanks for the recommendation.
One of these days I’m going to have to migrate to Linux so I can try Liferea out. I’ve read that Ubunto (Linux) is relatively easy to install.