As promised in my previous post, I'm covering the Linux Feed Reader or more commonly abbreviated to Liferea. Liferea is a standard, hassle free Linux application that is going to be a flagship application for reading all your RSS feeds within in a stand-alone application. It's an app that I use on a daily basis.
RSS feed readers are numerous and really a thing of the past. There are feed readers for Linux other than Liferea. You could use an email program like Evolution or Thunderbird to do just that. Liferea is also not the most lightweight among the bunch of feed readers available for Linux. So whats so great about it? I won't answer that question right away. Not before I do my pros and cons list, not before you see screenshots of the application running in all its glory.
Pros
Is exactly what you think it is; a feed reader for Linux. There aren't any other magical features to it that would distract you, like ability to comment on the feeds, thumbs up and down and all that excess baggage that comes with some feed readers.
Ability to customise the views for different feeds. As seen n the screen shot, you can have a customised view for different feeds.
Stability. Yeah... in all my experience of using this feed reader, it has never crashed, performed well and truly according to its description and never gone bonkers on me
Light-weight. Its not the very lightest but even with just bare minimum specs of a laptop I have the speed of reading the feeds is smooth and not botched by edgy scrolling and loading of pictures.
Use offline. As expected from a modern feed reader.
Search feeds quickly and easily. Comes in handy when you have a 1000 items in each feed and you need to catch up on something you read eons ago
Able to create news bins, comes in handy when you want to mark a feed as being in a certain category. Very handy if you are doing a research on current news.
Cons
A bug, I think, that causes pictures to load twice. This is the only real irritation that I found using this application. Pictures would start loading, like they do in browser, generate halfway through and then... start over again! This happens only once... and takes less then a few seconds, thankfully. Maybe it would get fixed
The feeds are not integrated with any global search engine of Linux, like Tracker that keeps track of your emails. I would like to search through my feeds in Liferea without really opening the program. I like Tracker so that's where I would like to see the feature included.
Less than perfect integration with the Messaging Menu. The unread feed count are not updated in the messaging menu until Liferea is restarted.
Preview
Liferea: The welcome page, very simple
An OMGubuntu feed item, showing how to transform Linux to Longhorn (in its look and feel)
A CNN feed item, showing that the world is not all sunshine and daisies. Notice the difference in view from the above screenshot
A feed item from a local e-newspaper showing that even Maldivians have branded electronics. Once again notice the different view (same as the screenshot above, different from the second screenshot)
Liferea in Natty, works like a charm. Showing a news bin named 'politics'. I move all politics related feeds into this bin. There is one more news bin below it called 'crime'
I couldn't come up with more cons then pros this time, that's because there aren't many cons to this application. Improvements required? Maybe if I could skin the application... make it show less white... have some themes to suit my Gothic needs. But the white works well for me right now.
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