Rss Bandit and Omea Reader
If you aren't already using a feed reader / RSS aggregator then, well, you need to. Or rather, if you read more than one or two blogs a day you need to. Like most people, I started reading my favorite blogs in the web browser. This seemed OK, but I missed a lot of posts since I never knew when a particular blog was updated, not to mention reading multiple blogs with a browser can be time consuming. I kept hearing about these new fangled thinga-majigs called RSS feed aggregators, and eventually decided to try one. After doing a little bit of research on the most popular ones I settled on Dare Obasanjo's RSS Bandit. Using a feed reader allows me to read blogs many times faster than using a browser, and I know I won't miss anything. RSS Bandit is a great feed reader and I've always recommended it to everyone for several reasons:
Happy as I am with RSS Bandit, I recently decided to try the new JetBrains Omea Reader. The Omea Reader is also build with .NET and is an interesting application. It's more visually apealing than RSS Bandit and has lots of little touches that make reading feeds even more pleasant. There are also many other features that I have yet to try like newsgroup reading, bookmarked web pages, and customizable workspaces. Some of them (such as newspaper view and news group reading) Dare is working hard on building into RSS Bandit, so I may switch back. But for the time being Omea Reader is my feed reader of choice. The one minor drawback is that it is not open source - it is owned by a company that will no doubt at some point charge for it. Right now, however, JetBrains has a limited offer where you can get a permanent license key for Omea Reader standard for free until January 1, 2005. You just have to fill out a form online and they email you the number. They just released the 1.0 version of Omea Pro today (for $45), which adds Email, IM, and other features to the free standard versions. However I would much rather use Outlook and stand-alone IM clients for those functionalities.
So what are you waiting for? Go download RSS Bandit or Omea Reader now if you're not already using an aggregator!
