FeedDemon: Speed dating with Feeds. FeedReader for serious feed aggregators!

Sep 14, 2008 by Vivek

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I have come to a point where I read (should I say brush through in most of the cases) over 500 RSS news feeds in a single day. Both because I am a full time blogger and need to stay updated one, and two that I love to read all the lovely blogs and authors who make Internet a better place. I use Google reader on most of the occasions for it’s a very good feed reader. However, sometimes when you are offline you wish you had a desktop reader that you could use to have the pleasure of reading offline or when your internet is down.

If you did not know there are plenty of solutions to attack this problem and one of the most popular is using FeedDemon. Feed Demon
is
the best
desktop RSS aggregator Feed Demon is the best desktop RSS aggregator and you don’t have to spend a single penny on it. With amazing options to make your feed reading and aggregating a cherish-able experience, FeedDemon rules the desktop market.

Let’s take a look at some of it’s features.

Tabs: For me the most amazing feature is tabs. It’s so addictive and so useful for someone like me who has countless fees to read in multiple categories. This one feature is enough for anyone to move off Google Reader.

Newspaper format: The channels of feed are displayed in a newspaper format and hence makes it easy for people to use it’s GUI.

Watches: Another wonderful feature. Here you can set keyword(s) to watch for when you have your feeds arriving. What it does is it puts all the news feeds in a particular watch. Let’s say if you want you keep track of “iPhone”. Now any website (of whose RSS you are using in FeedDemon) that writes about iPhone will go right into your watch.

It’s helpful because I can create a category inside feeddemon to read similar stories. And if I have countless feeds it’s a good way to separate what you are most interested about.

Styles: A great feature that should be integrated in Google Reader. It’s like theming your reader. Choose from 6 different styles. I just love the expando style as it gives me amazing flexibility.

Panic Button: Went on vacation just to realize that you have 100000 feeds in your FeedDeamon. Well it’s like a panic situation and easy solution is to just hit the panic button.

Search: A very powerful Search feature where you can search for keyword(s) and set various criteria like search with in last weeks feed and so on.

Speed: Nothing can match the speed of a desktop feed reader as it runs on your machine and doesn’t have to be dependent on the optimized code of online feed readers. Google Reader for example is great with AJAX but still cannot match the speed.

Also a Browser: When you want to read a complete article you just have to click the link and it opens the website’s article right into your FeedDemon. You can achieve this in Google Reader using a Greasemonkey script or Stylish.

Wisdom of the crowd: I love the feature “Popular Topics”. It gives me an idea of what post or feed article is popular among other readers.

Automatic Feed Discovery:Based on your reading habits, FeedDemon auto subscribes you to the similar feeds that you are addicted to most.

There are many other many other great features that makes this reader a nifty and must have application for serious feed readers and subscribers. Just try your hands on it and you wont go for any other feed aggregating and reading solution.