I concluded in an earlier post that hosting your own reader was the only rational solution. But although I have tried my best to like both Tiny Tiny RSS and Fever, neither gives me everything I want.

I ruled out TTRSS quickly. It just seemed a bit clunky to me. And although Fever is very slick, it's almost too slick. It has that iOS/Mac feel with lots of sexy white space that should actually be used for content (I'm a "fill the screen with plain text" kind-of-guy).

To cut a long story short, at the moment I'm trialling Feedbin, which has a nice familiar three-column setup, and I can see my folders and feeds Google Reader-style.

It still feels unfinished in places. For example, in Firefox the first column has a fixed and very narrow width, so all the feed titles are truncated. I pointed this out in the support forum and it turned out it was a bug the developer was aware of but had not dealt with. With a bug like that, Feedbin should still be calling itself a beta.

Like many of these new-ish offerings, Feedbin is basic in other ways. For example you can't adjust fonts or background colours unless you're fairly techy (e.g. you can use userContent.css in Firefox to make adjustments, which is what I did, but it's trial and error).

Rant: why does everyone use white backgrounds? Particularly for sites where you're going to spend a lot of time, it's the worst option. For anyone who feels the same, I already use this excellent Greasemonkey script, which does a great job on 95% of sites, including this forum (and can be tweaked to suit your own tastes). The reason I dismissed Feedly is that it's impossible to change the article background colour. It's always white, no matter what theme you choose, and no amount of playing with userContent.css or the Greasemonkey script could change that.</rant>

The most intriguing offering to me is actually Feed Wrangler, although I haven't tried it. Again looks a bit Mac-y to me, lots of white space. But I like the fact that it already offers smart folders (a.k.a. smart searches/virtual folders). That's not common, and very desirable.

But it doesn't look as if Feed Wrangler offers a basic folders/feeds view like Google Reader. I know it's old-fashioned, but if you have a lot of feeds, it's very efficient. I may be wrong, but Feed Wrangler doesn't offer a trial, so you'd have to be prepared to take a subscription and then ask for a refund if you don't like it, and I'm not that interested yet. I'll keep an eye on it.

When it comes to cache and temp files if you have enough memory put them on a RAM Disk, no loss of speed and if you want to save it on shutdown you can.

-pilgrim (May 28, 2013, 09:37 AM)

There have been one or two lengthy discussions here on the pros and cons of RAMdisks. Do you see significant benefits, pilgrim?

It rocks.

-Tuxman (April 09, 2013, 09:31 AM)

I'll try to be a bit more specific! I use The Bat because:

I have tried every IMAP client I can find, and I cannot find another client that will reliably update the folder count for virtual folders.

I do most of my communicating by email (I'm old-fashioned that way) and I live in a virtual folder ("saved search" in Thunderbird-speak) which I call "ToDo". That folder contains all of my unread mail and all of my starred (flagged) mail.

I can create a similar virtual folder in Thunderbird, but the folder count does not update reliably. I often have to refresh the virtual folder manually. Outlook won't even update the folder count reliably on standard IMAP folders.

This alone is enough to tie me to The Bat. UI-wise, I'd far prefer to be using Outlook, or even Windows Mail.

EDIT: I must admit that the last time I tried Outlook was the 2007 version. I got bored paying for upgrades, and I figured if they hadn't solved something as simple as updating IMAP folder counts by then, they were never going to do so. I am happy to be told I am wrong.