RSS readers are the greatest. I use the one in Safari as my regular reader. It’s easy to bookmark a feed and I notice when something new pops up because its right there in my browser chrome.
Often, however, I find myself clicking through to the actual blog when I see a fairly long article I want to read. The RSS feed is unformatted and runs the entire width of my browser viewport, an unacceptably long line-length to track when reading. Clicking through to the actual blog brings me to a well designed page where line-length is usually controlled by a columnar layout. This makes for much easier reading, and it looks nicer, too, since most designers have spent some time trying to make their blogs look attractive.
Am I the only person doing this? Is there an RSS reader that is formatted closer to the posting blogs appearance?
Safari is probably OK to track a feed or two but I keep an eye on a couple of hundred. For that I use the fabulous NetNewsWire (Pro) (Mac-only). http://ranchero.com
I have it set to use three panes – list of feeds in the left, headlines from any one or group of feeds in the middle and then individual posts in the right. It has a mini-browser built in so I can choose to view a post on its original web page if I want. This means the post itself has a line length of about 64 characters, but I can make it wider or narrower if I like.
NNW Pro includes its own stylesheets and users can also add their own. This means I can set my own fonts, sizes, colours etc and in fact I much prefer this to having designers’ choices inflicted on me via web pages.
NetNewsWire is one of the best applications around – the free version may meet your needs – but it’s definitely worth trying out.
Cheers,
Miraz
Thanks for the tip, Miraz. I’ll give it a try! I don’t watch 200 feeds, but I watch about 30, enough to make it worthwhile.