Primarily, this is a post about RSS.  You see, there's only one subscriber to the RSS feeds that are in all those tabs to the right (on the v5 site...which is the one that's available when this post is being written).  And there should be more!\

 

But first, a digression into ECE: the lab practical today was just meh.  It was a simple enough task, but the infernal contraption just wouldn't work for me!  So I ran out of time, and the TA came over to grade what I had, and all of a sudden it mostly started working (I had pulled out the Asynch Reset so I could debug it).  So I got a 9/10.  Which is good, but the amount of frustration was...even more frustrating.

 

Back to RSS.  It's just another XML format (kind of like most web pages are just the XHTML XML format).  However, there are these cool things called RSS Readers that can Subscribe to an RSS Feed (the XML file containing RSS).  When a feed (to use the simplified parlance of bloggers - people who author a Web Log, like the one that you're reading right now) is subscribed to, the RSS Reader will automatically check the feed for updates and display those to the user in whatever manner.  So subscribing to one of the RSS feeds on this site would mean you'd never have to manually come and visit it to see what's new: the Reader would take care of that for you.

 

I recommend that you check RSS out and see what it can do for you (like on this site).  I use RSS A LOT.  I'm subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds (not just blogs - change logs & "new releases" are things I've found to be condusive to use as RSS items).  And now onto a little problem I have...

 

Now, there are a wide variety of RSS Readers.  You have web based ones, like Start, live.com, Google Reader (I know Google has one at least), and a wide variety of much more popular sites.  There are addons & plugins for existing apps, like Newsgator: Outlook.  There are apps that have had Reader capabilities baked in (similar to the plugins), like Mozilla Thunderbird, a couple of Jabber clients, and Microsoft IE7.  And then there are the dedicated desktop, rich client RSS Aggregators.

 

I use the later.  Currently, this is RSS Bandit 1.2.117.  I started out with SharpReader, but that's waaay too memory intensive, and doesn't look that great in my opinion either.  But it lasted me a while.  The next client I tried was SauceReader, which looked great, but had even worse resource usage than SharpReader.  Finally, I tried RSS Bandit 1.2.114.  And that had me hooked: it was specifically designed to not trash system resources.  RSS Bandit has served me well for almost a year and a half now.

 

Development has also continued, lead primarily by Dare Obasanjo (www.25hoursaday.com).  They've had the 1.3 series of versions released for a bit now, and just rolled out a new one.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to get the 1.3 versions to work.  Between 1.2 and 1.3, they changed some of the UI components, and the new library just does not seem to want to work.  So whenever I go to use 1.3, all I get is a blank area where it should be displaying the tree view of the feeds I'm subscribed to.  Which means that the program is completely useless, as none of the other sections of the program (post contents & post list for the currently selected feed) get populated.  I have seen this problem even on fresh installations of Windows, with just XP SP2 & .NET 1.1 SP1 installed.  Obviously everything is working fine for most people, just not for me.

 

As stated before, I've been running the older version of RSS Bandit because of that issue.  However, that solution is becoming increasingly inadequite.  A number of the feeds I'm subscribed to use ATOM (as far as end users are concerned, it's the same as RSS...just a different company's take on the whole feed idea), and have recently moved from the 0.3 version to the 1.0 version of the spec.  Which means RSS Bandit 1.2 can no longer view them.

 

So, any recommendations for a new RSS Aggregator?  It needs to support ATOM 1.0, podcasting support is not needed, I'd like it to look nice, preferably be a standalone client (although something that acts as an addin to Outlook might also work for me), and ideally be free/cheap.

 

Thanks!