I discovered the benefits of using RSS/Atom Feeds over two years ago. Feeds are a method by which users may subscribe to websites and have the latest content delivered to them, without the need to visit the sites in question. If you read a number of websites the main benefits are two-fold; Not only is content delivered to you as it is created, but you do not waste time visiting sites that have not been updated. Using Feeds I found I was able to read about more topics that interest me in a far shorter time.
After trying various ways of reading feeds I eventually settled on a combination of FeedDemon and NewsGator Online. FeedDemon was fast and efficient, the synchronization via NewsGator Online meant that items read on my home PC were marked as read on my work PC, and vice-versa. I could also use the NewsGator Online website to check feeds from any webbrowser.
Google Reader, a web-based solution, was one of the products I passed over in favor of FeedDemon. When the Google Reader team released a new version at the end of last month I decided to try it out for a few days. Exporting/importing OPML feeds makes it easy to try out different readers without the need to recreate subscriptions.
My ‘few days’ has almost become three weeks, and I find it hard to imagine going back to FeedDemon and NewsGator.
