For those of you who have started RSSing

I have been using RSS for the last 4 months or so, and I have faced some problems with the way I use it (I use My Yahoo and now My MSN as well. Don't ask me, “Why 2?”. Techies always like having more than one for some unidentified reason. For this reason, they usually have a dozen email ids. 🙂 Anyway, let's continue…)

* My Yahoo just displays a summary of the RSS feed at the maximum. So if I need to read the entire feed then I have no choice but to actually go that site and find out. I think mentioned this sometime back.
* I cannot distinguish between RSS feeds that I have already read and the ones that I haven't.
* I cannot save a feed for future use.
* I cannot email a particular entry to someone else. (I can only tell them the feed link.)
* The entries are refreshed everyday (I have customized My Yahoo to display atmost 5 entries and a short summary for each). So what if I need to see the last 2 days' entries?

Well, apparently the problem is not with RSS but with the way I have been using it. My Yahoo and My MSN provide RSS support, but apparently they are more concerned with integration of various services that they provide (mail, address book, etc). Atleast, this is true with My Yahoo.

I found a better solution yesterday. I was on the lookout for a reader specializing in RSS, that is able to satisfy my requirements.

And I entered “online rss reader” and I got a million (I don't know exactly how many) sites. Newsgator won the race. A quick registration and I was done. It has the following features:

* Easy and quick registration (not like MSN 🙂 )
* Quick feed adds.
* Import feeds (using some new format OPML. Haven't heard of it before.)
* Store feeds in separate directories.
* Distinguish read and unread entries.
* Pretty neat interface.
* Store entries, mail them to friends etc…

To summarize, it looks somewhat like a mailbox with all unread mails (I mean feed entries :P) in bold and all feeds displayed in a separate column to the left. And ya, you don't have spam here!

One interesting feature I saw was that it was able to display some images as well! I am not quite sure how this is supported in RSS. Gotta find out. Anyone out there who knows?