This final installment of the series looks at news readers that use software you already have to deliver content. The �€œsoftware you already have�€� can mean either your browser or your email client.

The down side to using your email client is pretty obvious: if you want to see the content in its original form, and particularly if you want to read and participate in comments or follow embedded links, at some point you’re going to have to jump to your browser. The up side is that once you’ve downloaded your email that content stays with you until you trash it, so this might provide a convenient alternative for those who are tempted by stand-alone readers that would allow them to read offline. And email clients are already equipped to inform you of new �€œmessages�€� in a way that’s unmistakable.

I didn’t spend a lot of time checking these out because personally I have no interest in having news and blog feeds in my email. And while a number of these services suggest that they would allow you to compose blog posts in your email client and �€œmail�€� them in, that’s another feature that didn’t tempt me. I’m an obsessive user of the preview feature in Movable Type (and now WordPress). It doesn’t get published until I’ve previewed it and checked the links. And I would think that bloggers who rely on the user-friendly tools in their blogging software to assist with the HTML coding would be even harder pressed to make do with an email client for composing posts.

That said (does Bush really say that a lot?), there was one blogger who pinged a previous post of mine on the subject and wrote that he thought it would be sweet to get a daily email with the headlines in it. There’s a way, Darcey.

There’s a product called PopHeadlines which works by setting up a POP3 (incoming) mail server on your system which goes out and gets the feeds. You then set up a separate email account for each subscription. So you can set up an account called “CBC” and get the day’s headlines. Or probably get headlines every fifteen minutes since that’s how often the CBC updates its feeds. Bear in mind that as with a couple of the products I looked at in the previous installment, this one requires Microsoft’s .NET framework. That should be enough to tell you that this is a Windows-only solution.

There’s supposed to be a similar service available called Info Aggregator from BlogStreet but all attempts to access it have gotten me a �€œcould not be found�€� error so I’m not sure what’s happening there.

And while I’ve mostly stuck to free products, I’ll mention that there are two commercial products that integrate with the full version of Microsoft Outlook. I realize there are people who swear by Outlook and practically live in it, but I’m not one of them. I loathe Outlook. You’re on your own here.

As so, on to the browser.

BlogMatrix Jäger, a cross-platform reader that runs on Windows, Mac OS 10.3 and Linux (Red Hat Fedora), is open source though it will nag you for at least a small contribution to the cause. This is a stand-alone product in the sense that you download it, install it and run it separately. Think of it as a floating sidebar that uses your browser to display the content. I had to fiddle a bit to figure out how this works �€“ the only documentation is online and seems a bit sparse. My biggest concern was determining how content was marked as read so I’d be able to tell easily when a feed had something fresh. It turns out that double-clicking on the feed title will mark all the items in a feed as read (by turning the font colour of the titles from blue to black) while loading the main site in your default browser. Double-clicking on an individual post title will mark that item as read while loading that article in your browser. If you have the program’s preferences set to view on-line and leave it there at all times, then you’ll be relying on the context menu option when you want to read offline and that doesn’t mark anything as read. If you use double-click for that, you have to put up with your browser’s error message when it complains because there’s no internet connection. So if you’re liable to use the product both on and offline, you need to access the program’s preferences in each session to get content marked as read when it’s appropriate. The other weakness in terms of the core functions, at least relative to most of the other products I’ve seen, is that local archiving can only be controlled across the board, i.e. for all the feeds collectively and not by individual feed.

The offline reader will present content either in blog format or one article at a time and your browser’s normal font controls can be used to increase or decrease font size. There are some higher end features here, including support for Podcasts �€“ described as �€œrich attachments of video or audio.�€� I’ve seen signs that support for attachments is working its way into other products. It may be the �€œnext big thing�€� in RSS.

Pluck is designed specifically to integrate with Internet Explorer. It requires IE 6.0 and either Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or higher, or Windows XP with SP 1 or higher. I had to scrub some of my original comments about Pluck when I went back to their website and discovered a new version had been released replacing the beta version I originally looked at. I still noticed a couple of things that didn’t work properly, but there were other intuitive ways to get the job done so that didn’t really slow me down. And it is improved. It sets up a sidebar in which it lists your feed folders on top and the feeds in the selected folder on the bottom, with the number of new items in the feed in brackets after the feed title. Clicking on a feed loads it into the main screen in offline viewer mode, which can be either blog format using the whole viewing area or item format which puts titles and excerpts on top and the full article for the selected item (provided it’s in the feed, of course) on the bottom. The first view provides a link to each post, but there’s no link to the main site. Since I was using IE, those sites where Haloscan had previously presented problems were fully functional.

Pluck supports auto-discovery and allows you to control the update frequency and the number of days that content is stored by individual feed. It also has a custom feed feature which it calls a Perch. I set one up on the search string �€œMaher Arar�€�, since that’s a story I follow closely, and immediately got 76 items to read from a wide variety of news sources. That has possibilities. If you’re happy with Internet Explorer this might just do it for you, though while it may be seem a minor quibble to some I found the lack of a link to a site’s front page annoying.

I attempted to look at NewsMonster, a reader that integrates with the Mozilla suite and requires Java 1.4. It broke Mozilla, i.e. when I restarted Mozilla as instructed after downloading the product, I didn’t get past the splash screen. So much for that. I went back to the website for a second look and found that this hasn’t been updated since July, 2003 while Mozilla has been upgraded many times since then. This one may be a dead end.

But if you use Firefox there’s a possibility. There’s an extension called Sage that purports to give you �€œa lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.�€� That probably depends on your point of view since this has no offline capability at all. It appears that it accesses the feed long enough to provide an indication of new content, and supplies the item titles for the selected feed in the lower half of the sidebar with the unread titles in bold. But it doesn’t store the whole feed so attempting to access anything while offline will just get you an error. While online, when you select a feed it accesses it from the feeding site again and presents a digest view with the entire article included where available and all the articles in the current feed in a two-column format. From there you can load the main site through a link at the top or an individual post through the link that doubles as the post title. Splitting the sidebar is a nice touch since it leaves the rest of window for reading content. Sage supports auto-discovery and updates feeds on demand, though the ability to select an individual feed to update would be a welcome addition. And obviously it’s open source, cross-platform and free.

And that brings us to the end of the product reviews.

So after looking at all these different products, what am I going to do? For the moment, Sage, and here’s why. I’m on cable which means that when my system is powered up, I’m online. It also means that the extra delay in accessing the original site in all its HTML glory is often negligible. I prefer Firefox anyway and usually run it with the sidebar open. By placing two buttons on my toolbar, I can toggle the sidebar between normal bookmarks and Sage with one click. It works for me.

If you’re new to this technology and interested in exploring it, and either running a different browser or not interested in even the minor download and install that’s involved with Sage, the most painless way to get started is with one of the online services described in Part 2. But if you’re running a laptop that’s often cut off from the internet, or if you’re online time is otherwise limited, you may want a product that allows you to store the feeds and read offline. Internet Explorer users might be quite happy with Pluck. Otherwise there are the email-based services discussed at the top of this post or the stand-alone readers reviewed in Part 3.

I would expect to see changes in this technology and in the products available for a while. As I said above in reference to BlogMatrix Jäger, I’ve seen signs that video and audio attachments to feeds are going to become common which will probably set off another round of product revisions. (And I would dearly hope that dialup users will have some options here so that updating a large number of feeds doesn’t become unmanageable.) I would also expect that there will be some shakeout in the products available. It seems a fairly crowded market right now in some areas. And I’d bet that in the long run there will be a trend to incorporating more and more of this functionality into browsers and email clients.

So I’m back where I started �€“ I can’t simply say �€œthis is the only reader worth bothering with�€� and leave it at that. It depends on the type of internet service you have, how serious a user you might be and even what your work habits and preferred tools are. But hopefully I’ve given you some idea of what to think about when selecting a product to try. If you depend on the ‘net (or the ‘nets as I guess we’re calling it now) for a lot of your reading, there are a lot of different ways to gain the convenience this technology offers.

And now I have a question: can I uninstall all these products now? My desktop is a mess. (So’s my real desk top but that’s normal, eh.)