Time for a new feed reader

This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Ever since I started using an RSS aggregator, I’ve used Feedreader. It’s a simple, but functional RSS and ATOM feed reader and I like it a lot, but twice now it has lost my headlines. The first time was probably about a year ago, so I downloaded the latest version and installed it. Then, a couple of days back, my PC crashed and when I restarted, Feedreader couldn’t read the headlines file. There was no option to retry. It just recreated it, downloaded the most recent headlines again, and I didn’t have a clue what I’d read and what I hadn’t (and of course had lost most of the earliest posts that were cached). I was running version 2.7, build 646 (the latest version is 2.9) but instead of upgrading (that’s the mixed blessing of open source software – there’s always a later version), I think I’ll try something different…

I thought about using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, but they are just not quite what I’m after (and I couldn’t import my blogroll via OPML). Then I found Sage – a feed reader for Firefox.

Sage: a feed reader for Firefox

One of the things I love about Sage is the “newspaper style” rendering of feeds, as shown above. Another thing that I found out is that the line breaks do actually work in the RSS and ATOM versions of the feeds from this blog (sometimes there seems to be problem whereby the text appeared in Feedreader as one long block and I thought the problem was Blogger‘s ATOM generation).

It’s early days yet, but Sage is looking good so far.

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