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.

The interface of Google Reader makes browsing new items a quick and streamlined process. The “river of news” view, where content from all feeds is mixed into one list, is something Google Reader does a lot better than FeedDemon. I especially like the way items are marked as read once scrolled past - removing the need to manually mark items or feeds as read is a welcome change. There’s also a form of “smart sort”, where items from less regularly updated feeds appear higher in the list of new content.

One of the features I most like about Google Reader is something that FeedDemon has long lacked; the ability to ‘Clip’, or in Reader terminology, ‘Star’, items for later reading, and to have this synchronized across different machines. NewsGator Online, the synchronization backbone of FeedDemon, supports this yet the the FeedDemon client does not. Along with proper folder hierarchies for Feeds this is one of the most often and long-requested features for FeedDemon.

There’s also the matter of cost; Whereas Google Reader is free FeedDemon costs a one-off payment of $30 for the current version, with synchronization via NewsGator Online costing an additional $20 annually. In my opinion FeedDemon is certainly not $50 better value than Google Reader. Should Google start exposing an API for Google Reader to allow integration with third-party applications or webpages then NewsGator may well find itself in a sticky situation.

So if you’re using FeedDemon, or a different RSS/Atom reader then I really do recommend checking out Google Reader. I think you’ll be impressed. And if you’ve never tried using NewsFeeds, then now’s the time!

This works great, however Opera 9 added an incredibly useful content (read: advert) blocker to the default menus which is not available in Rijk’s pre-Opera 9 offering. To rectify this I’ve created a new version which takes the menus as-shipped in Opera 9 and adds “Send To FeedDemon” options.

To install follow these steps;

1. Within Opera go to the “Help” menu and choose “About”
2. Look for the path titled “Opera directory”, within this directory create a new directory called “menu” if it does not exist.
3. Download the file below and place it in this directory.
4. In Opera, go to Tools->Preferences, select the Advanced Tab and choose “Toolbars” on the left.
5. In “Menu Setup” select the Opera9 FeedDemon extension, then click ok.
6. Voila!

http://www.andrewgrant.org/public/opera/menu/Opera9_FeedDemon_Menu_Extention.ini

Note; I’ve noticed that some people seem to be able to create extensions that Opera appears to recognise when clicked upon. I’ve no idea how this is done, however I suspect it relies on the files being hosted somewhere on the Opera domain.

Update: Andrew Herron tells me that this is achieved by changing the application type for to x-opera-configuration-menu via an .htaccess entry. I’ve tried this to no avail, I already modify .htaccess for some things so I can only assume my hosts (AQHost) webserver is setup to prevent this type of rewrite. I had problems getting pings and trackbacks to work in Wordpress as they block access to xmlrpc.php so this wouldn’t surprise me, although I should mention other than these two things I’ve found them to be an excellent hosting service.