A survey of RSS aggregators

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Over the years, the proliferation of news sites, weblogs and other sites with daily updates has made it nearly impossible for the average user to visit every site of interest in a timely fashion. For those of us who want or need to keep informed on a variety of topics, RSS, RDF and Atom feeds have become a nearly indispensable tool to skim the headlines for many sites at once without having to spend more than an hour per day clicking through bookmarks. However, this raises the question of how to manage news feeds effectively.

There are a fair number of RSS aggregator projects on Freshmeat, but we decided to limit our scope to applications that are fairly mature, have been updated recently (many RSS aggregator projects listed on Freshmeat have not been updated in years) and run on the desktop. In particular, we were looking for aggregators that handle a large number of feeds, make it easy to manage feeds and integrate well with the Linux desktop and the average user's workflow.

For some time now, this writer has used the Bloglines service to browse RSS feeds. For this article, the feed list from Bloglines, containing about 130 RSS/RDF and Atom feeds, was exported as an OPML file and imported that into each of the aggregators to see how they performed.

RSSOwl

The first aggregator we'll look at is RSSOwl. This aggregator is written in Java, using the SWT graphic library. RSSOwl has a fairly flexible interface, and opens up tabs for each new feed that the user opens from the list of "favorites."

There are a few interesting features in RSSOwl. First, RSSOwl has an export feature, which can be used to export a feed or individual article to PDF, Rich Text (RTF) or HTML. This might be handy for saving feeds and entries for later. RSSOwl also supports AmphetaRate, a centralized ratings service for rating articles found in news feeds.

Oddly, it seems to display feeds as plain text rather than rendering the HTML. We're not sure if this is a glitch in RSSOwl or if we missed a step in setting it up. Otherwise, RSSOwl's performance was very good, and it handled a large number of feeds without any problems.

Snownews

The Snownews aggregator is unique in this list, because it's not a graphical application. Snownews is a console-based feed-reader that uses ncurses, and is a fairly straightforward application with few frills.

Snownews does not support OPML directly, but there is an "opml2snow" script that comes with Snownews to convert OPML into the format that Snownews likes. It's a little more of a hassle than the easy-import offered by other readers, but it gets the job done. Snownews displays headlines and feeds inline. To follow the feed URL, one must use an external browser. It works fairly well with GUI browsers, but works best (at least in this writer's opinion) with a text-mode browser like w3m or Lynx.

It's probably not going to be the first choice for most users, but those who prefer browsing in w3m or other text-mode browsers should definitely check it out.

Liferea

One reader that seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment is the Linux Feed Reader, Liferea. This is a nicely-designed newsreader that's easy to use. It imported our OPML file with no problems, and gives the user the option of rendering HTML with Mozilla or GtkHTML2. It spawns an external browser for full articles rather than displaying them within the Liferea window. This works well if you prefer to browse content in Firefox, Epiphany or another browser, but we would like it if Liferea would give the option of displaying the entire article inside Liferea itself.

One interesting feature with Liferea is the ability to create a new feed from a Feedster search. This can be quite handy if you're interested in finding feeds on a specific topic from a variety of sources.

If one wishes to be alerted, or interrupted, with updates from subscribed feeds, Liferea has a feature that will pop up a notification window at regular intervals with new headlines. We enabled this feature briefly, but turned it off after an hour or so, finding it quite distracting.

We also found Liferea to be a bit less than stable, at least the 0.9.0 release that is available in Ubuntu Hoary. Liferea crashed a few times when doing something as simple as deleting a feed. Overall, its performance was quite good, and the interface is excellent -- but it might need to stabilize a bit before being our first choice of the available aggregators.

Blam

Blam is a aggregator written in C# using Mono and GTK#. It's a little more basic than Liferea or Snownews, but it serves well as a basic newsreader. Headlines and summaries are displayed within Blam, but it requires an internal browser to follow links.

At first, Blam would not import the OPML from Bloglines. We tried subscribing a few feeds manually and then exporting Blam's list to OPML to find out what was different. The difference was that Bloglines uses "title" for the name of each feed, and Blam expects "text" -- after doing a quick search and replace in Vim, changing "title" to "text," Blam imported the list of feeds just fine.

Blam is a good choice for users who want a very basic newsreader that's fast and light.

Akregator

KDE users are probably already familiar with Akregator. This reader uses KHTML to display full articles in tabs within the Akregator interface, at least by default. Akregator can also be configured to use an external browser for those who prefer Firefox or another browser to Konqueror/KHTML.

For users who prefer Konqueror for Web browsing, Akregator is an excellent choice. Konqueror auto-discovers feeds on pages, and makes it easy to add those feed subscriptions to Akregator. Akregator has fewer frills than Liferea or RSSOwl, but it integrates very well with KDE and performs well.

Firefox and Thunderbird

We should also mention Firefox and Thunderbird. While not dedicated aggregators, both applications allow users to read and manage news feeds. However, they lack a number of features that many users would want, at least natively. The advantage of using Firefox as an aggregator is that Firefox makes it very easy to create a "Live Bookmark" to subscribe to feeds, when the browser discovers the feed in a page.

If Firefox doesn't detect the feed, that complicates things greatly. Firefox supports adding a bookmark manually, but does not support adding a feed manually. The Live Bookmark also doesn't allow the user to preview the content or full text, just the headlines from a feed. Firefox doesn't support importing OPML files natively, so users with large subscription lists would have to go through a lot of work to re-subscribe to sites using Firefox.

Of course, it is possible to extend Firefox's capabilities with extensions. We tried the Sage extension with Firefox, and were quite pleased with it. The Sage extension adds a sidebar to Firefox much like the Bookmarks and History sidebars. There are two panes in the sidebar, a list of subscriptions and lower pane that lists headlines from the selected feed.

The integration with Firefox makes it a convenient aggregator for those of us who use Firefox exclusively or extensively. Sage had no problem importing the OPML list exported from Bloglines, and its performance was quite acceptable. There are a number of other news reading extensions for Firefox for those who are interested.

Thunderbird, by itself, is also limited in its abilities to import and manage feeds. For users who spend a lot of time in their e-mail client, and who have a fairly limited number of feeds, it would work well -- but this writer would not like to have to import 100 or more feeds using the "Manage Subscription" dialog for Thunderbird. The advantage to using Thunderbird for feeds is the ability to mail links from subscribed feeds.

We found the Forumzilla extension for Thunderbird, which adds OPML import and other features to Thunderbird. Unfortunately, it consistently crashed Thunderbird when trying to import the OPML exported from Bloglines.

Summary

After spending time with each of these aggregators, this writer prefers Liferea and Sage, though any of the aggregators would do in a pinch. Given the variety and maturity of the various options, Linux users should not have much trouble finding an aggregator that works well for them.