FeedDemon: The Best Offline Feed Reader
Posted on 03. Nov, 2009 by Chinmoy Kanjilal in Software, Windows
Reading feeds is an integral part of keeping up to date with the latest happenings on the Internet. Almost all blogs provide their users with an option to subscribe to their feeds.
Now, feeds are a powerful medium of compact knowledge, but if you start reading too many of them, you have every chance of missing out the important news on time. Reading just a few of them might make you miss out on certain other perspectives of an event. In these situations, you run into a problem either way.
Another thing that can be a challenge with feed readers is that they don’t all provide offline reading options. This isn’t a big deal for everyone, but it can be for some users.
A feed reader goes a long way in making life easier. I have tried out a lot of feed readers but none of them could attract me as much as FeedDemon.
FeedDemon has lots of great features that we need to cover in order to give you an idea of what it brings to the table, so lets just get right into them.
Features
Feed Prefetch
feeddemon-prefetch-options
Feed Prefetch allows you to prefetch feeds in order to read them later and offline. The prefetch location can be selected and the items to be prefetched can also be defined. Prefetching of embedded content can be turned off if not required. The maximum number of feeds to be prefetched and the age of the feeds to be prefetched can be customized heavily.
This highly customizable prefetch option helps a lot in reading feeds offline. The feed prefetch can be backed up and restored as well. Options for compacting the prefetch database are also available.
Informative Homepage
The homepage of the FeedDemon UI has a lot of information. It shows a quick list of popular content, and a sidebar with the number of unread feeds to check your inactivity, your tagged feeds, and all the folders on the left hand side of the display.
Folder Organization
feeddemon-folders
With FeedDemon , organizing feeds into folders is much more than just putting them there. Clicking on a folder will show you the latest feeds. So if your folders are arranged with a certain category, you get the latest news from that category. Also, the feeds which have been updated today, yesterday and before that are shown under separate headers.
Themes
FeedDemon provides many different color themes for reading through the feeds. This improves readability and soothes the eye for hours of reading. I prefer using the blue theme.
Managing Subscriptions
The subscription list of FeedDemon can be exported and imported into/from any other application. On exporting the existing subscription list, the folder view remains intact, even when you synchronize FeedDemon with Google reader.
Dinosaurs and Panic Button
The Dinosaur feature allows us to check the feeds which have not been updated in 60 days. This lets you chose which feeds to ignore with the next prefetch to save network usage as well as disk space. The panic button tells us when the feed database gets bloated with unread items. This deletes feeds which are older than a certain number of days, which we can specify.
Other than this, FeedDemon has an extremely light and user friendly UI which is amazingly smooth in spite of handling so many threads all together. Tagging and analysis of feeds helps us reduce effort to search through all the contents to read all the important news. A keyword search feature is also available which returns all feeds with a certain text in the feed body.
FeedDemon is one of the most popular feed readers. Know more and try out FeedDemon here.
(By) Chinmoy Kanjilal is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He has an in depth knowledge of working of Softwares, Operating Systems, Hardwares and Computer Networks. Blogging is his favourite pasttime. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.
Related Posts
One Response to “FeedDemon: The Best Offline Feed Reader”
Leave a Reply
- Top 10 Ways to Discover New Music
- Top 6 Free Antivirus Programs
- Google Wave Invites
- 5 Great Alternatives to the Twitter Interface
- How To Use Apple's Magic Mouse on a Windows PC
- 10 Great Ways to Use Evernote
-
Affy: VLC is now skinnable and plays rmvb files too. Som...
-
Toz: PhotoRec is really good too. http://www.cgsecurit...
-
James: I would like to recommend the Windows Key Finder 1...
-
Josh: I think I figured it out, I'm actually running a l...
-
Kyle Judkins: You're welcome!...
Chris Smith
03. Nov, 2009
I really like the idea of the “dinosaurs” button. I wish that there was a way to do this in Google Reader.
Offline RSS readers seem somewhat impractical to me; I like being able to have my feeds synced wherever I am. Nonetheless I am going to give this a try.