Yesterday, FeedDemon released the new beta version of the software. It was silently released on Twitter by it’s developer Nick Bradbury. I am sure the move was to avoid the limelight and make sure that the news reaches only targeted few. I am lucky to be following him on twitter and hence I managed to get my hands on it. There are a few improvements but nothing exceptionally radical.

The new beta version of feeddemon 2.8 for me has been stable, being able to handle over 1000 feeds. The most noticeable feature is that when you move from one page to another in feeddemon 2.8 beta 1, there’s a soothing transition effect. Apart from this there are some feature improvements. Let’s have a look at a few of them:

• FeedDemon beta 1 finally gets the tagging feature. This was expected as most of the web today is tag based and I always missed this feature. Even greater news is that these tags are not synchronized with your newsgator account.
• The tag cloud is also visible on the subscription page.
• Tags can be dragged from the tree and dropped onto a post in a FeedDemon newspaper.
• Tagging is now included in the attention algorithm:
• Hourglass icon now appears on browser tabs that are still loading

You can check the rest of the feature addition and feature changes here.

As this is a beta release it is bound to have bugs, so please use it at your own risk. Take a back up of your feeds OPML before using this release. Also, you can help the developers by reporting the bugs by posting a message in the FeedDemon 2.8 Beta Forum, and please include 2.8B1.

Download FeedDemon 2.8 Beta 1

If I were to boast something about me then it would be the fact that I am a voracious feed reader. And I am a big fan of feeddemon . But unfortunately this lovely feed reader is not available for Linux and I did not want to take the pain of using Firefox feed reader or for that matter any other alternative like thunderbird or Google reader. The reason is I wanted something that was totally a desktop application dedicated to only feed reading without any other strings attached.My search ended soon as I came across this lovely feed reader of Linux called as Liferea.

Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is an aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for Gtk/Gnome. It is a reader for RSS/RDF feeds which also supports CDF channels, Atom/Echo/PIE feeds and OCS directories.

So how do you get this lovely feed reader. If you are on Ubuntu the easiest way to get Liferea is by getting a debian package. As we try our best to give you GUI means of installing stuff on Ubuntu, getting a deb package of Lifrea is the best option. You can get the package here.

All you have to do now is to install it by double clicking and entering your admin password. You ca access Lifereas from the Application menu.

Application->Internet->Liferea Feed Reader

You can also install Liferea in Ubunut by typing the following command in a terminal window.

sudo aptget install liferea

Once you open Liferea you can import your feeds into liferea very easily. All you have to do is have your favorite feeds exported from your other reader in OPML format.

I am sure Liferea will make you feed reading, aggregating and managing a much better experience.

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.