Peter's Gekko

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FeedDemon: absolutly great !

I was still looking for a news-aggregator. Having tried everything I could get my hands on, RSS Bandit was the only one which had survived. I learned to live with its pecularities, the most annoying being its ability to forget time after time the channels I want to read and the post I had allready read. Everytime I switched on my machine after a standby or hibernation RSS had lost track. Something supposed to be fixed in the version I run..

From the PDC bloggers page I followed the link to FeedDemon, another news-agregator. Installed and liked it from the very first moment. The UI is cool and FeedDemon it has a rich set of features. To mention just two of them :

A fully functional browser included. This browser does understand the back and forward buttons of my mouse. (Most included browsers don't)
When you use the browser to navigate to a log page and click the OPML link FeedDemon pops up a dialog and after a few clicks you're up and reading the blog. Like the infamous gotdotnet blog.

When it comes to crosslinks FeedDemon follows a different approach. Instead of listing the comments it was able to find it doesn't show anything in the list of posts. But when you click a post it will show the full post page, including the comments, in the browser. I can live with that.

Highly recommended !

Blog on,

Peter

Published Sep 24 2003, 07:24 AM by pvanooijen

Comments

Mark DiGiovanni said:

Great app!

# September 24, 2003 7:42 AM

Dare Obasanjo said:

RSS Bandit does have some issues remembering what you've read if the item doesn't have a link or guid (such as in a number of posts on Dave Winer's feed) but I haven't come across issues with it forgetting entire channels.

Can you provide more details because I'd like to fix such problems.

Thanks.

# September 24, 2003 10:34 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

To specify my RSS (1.1.0.16) problems:

My machine is set to standby or hibernated once a day. Usualy I only log on to Windows once in a couple of days. Depends what I've been doing :> RSS is running all the time. When my machine wakes up most post who were marked as read are marked as unread again.

When adding new channels RSS will (always?) forget these if I don't manualy (using the menu) shut down RSS and restart it. And that is quite annoying.

# September 25, 2003 2:37 AM

Dare Obasanjo said:

I haven't heard anyone make the complaints you have about losing channels although the flaky behavior when recovering from standby was a known issue.

Can you try the latest version (1.1.0.36) available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml09152003.asp and see if this works any better?

Thanks.

# September 25, 2003 10:14 PM