Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
A unified solution for note taking and task management
superboyac:
40hz
check out Rooster RSS Agent
http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/rooster.htm
Ska
-SKA (July 15, 2012, 09:10 AM)
--- End quote ---
Hmm...Rooster looks VERY interesting. I'm checking it out now. Lots of options, very lightweight, shockingly flexible! I'm going to load some feeds and try it out for a few days and see if it agrees with me.
[update]
ok, first issue. It doesn't look like it has any ability to download full articles, just the stupid rss summaries. That's my main issue with all these tools. What's the point of using these hardcore news software, when in the end, you still have to go to the actual site in the actual browser to read it? If the software can't grab the content to show within it, it loses so much value with me. Because then it just becomes a link collector pretty much. I don't need to make more work for myself by opening up a program, clicking two or three times just to send me to a website in the browser. If I wanted that, all I'd do is get a bookmark manager and start clicking each bookmark one at a time. It's really not much different.
If anyone made a reader that fulfilled 40hz' specs above, it would be hugely popular and possibly profitable. The issue I see with it is that it's stepping all over google's toes and also the website owners. They obviously don't want their articles downloadable, they want you going to their site and looking at 2 inches of article content and 6 inches of ads.
And the software with the built in browser is not much better, like website watcher. because the browser is most likely inferior to your actual browser that you have all your plugins and ad blockers and stuff worked out so the experience is well suited for you. Going back to an internal browser without those features sucks ass.
You can see my Rooster screenshot below, testing with the John August feed:
A unified solution for note taking and task management
What's the point? All that wasted space because most good rss feeds have a couple lines of summary and you have to go to the website to read the full thing. So the software becomes rather useless to me.
superboyac:
I love how all these rss readers have an option for "summary" and "full article". It's funny how there isn't much difference between the two. What...like 2 lines of text more? Whop dee doo.
superboyac:
OK, i just tried FeedDemon's prefetching feature, which is supposed to be the best in the biz. It sucks. It's not their fault, it's just the state of affairs. All of the "success" models for websites today require you to actually visit the site, whether it's a commercial site or a hobby blog. Hardly anyone is going to make content available in a truly offline way. You just can't escape the browser application or google quite yet, and probably not for a while. Here's what prefetching looks like:
A unified solution for note taking and task management
Lame, isn't it.
Again, if I have to actually visit the website in the browser for more than half my feeds, having an rss reader to be is pretty worthless. Why am I going to go through the trouble and configure this sophisticated rss news system for myself only to keep clicking on the actual websites still? There's no point.
superboyac:
Here's a possible, but complex solution:
I've been using ClipMate recently, it's very powerful. What if you created clipmate filters so that if you copied content from a specified group of websites, all those clips would go into a "newsfeed" folder? It's not perfect, but at least you can go to each website, copy everything, and then read it inside clipmate. I don't know, that's pretty klunky...
rgdot:
I guess it comes down to finding some form of automatic link/site grabber instead of looking for a RSS tool
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version