Another part of notonegoro.net

November 19, 2006

RSSOwl, let the owl feed you!

Filed under: FOSS @ 3:16 pm

There’s a lot enough for me to open websites each day, well though not that much but can take more attention than work I have on desk. :)) Meanwhile this brain can’t store everything, with things around. So I’ve decided to use RSS reader as a choice.

For you who don’t know what RSS is, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary though some mentioned it as Really Simple Syndication. With RSS you can easily surf the “world” without bothering to remember each URLs you visited. Well I know, you can use bookmark for this. But don’t you bother to click all the bookmarks you have each time, meanwhile there are no new news on that website? With RSS you can sit nice and take a look only if there are new news on the websites you have been feed before.

To feed the websites that support RSS, you can use RSS reader. Lately, I have tried one and it’s quite nice, I think. I used RSSOwl on this case. This easy-to-install program made by written in Java, so it’s cross platform. You can use it on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Linux 64 Bit and Solaris. But make sure to have Java Environment
installed on the system to make the Graphical User Interface working, preferably 1.4.2 or 1.5.x version. FYI, I used RSSOwl 1.2.2. Beside that, you can also use liferea, Straw, Blam or Akregrator. The applications I just mentioned above were running on Linux. :)

The installation was went just fine. Hey, it just next-next and then finished on my Windows box. :) It gave a lot of favorites for you to look at as another addition that something perhaps you don’t know before. Favorites here refer to the the feed of your favorite RSS website. If you don’t like it, you can delete them easily as well as to add some others.

RSSOwl let you to organize the entries into category and sub-category and to export favorites to OPML file and vice versa. To add favorites just simply click the ‘+’ icon on the toolbar and it will ask you what RSS website you would like to add. To make it even simplier, you can copy the URL from any program you have (worked on me from notepad and Firefox) and trala! like magic, the URL itself will paste to Add Favorite window, so you don’t need to do the paste again. :) The newsfeed can be set to aggregate after around of time, automatically without your interference. The newsfeed also can be generate to PDF, RTF, or HTML if you like. The generate file just give you the what RSSOwl present to the window, nothing special for me. Perhaps it is use to remember the synopsis of the happening and took place. You can read the newsfeed offline too if you want to, to do that just click File –> Work Offline.

If you like tidiness, you can give mark all your favorites as read, in case you don’t like the status of how many favorites you haven’t read. Or you can give all your favorites status as unread. You also can search on a category that you have been aggregate the feed previously. The newsfeed you have can be rated to Fantastic, Good, Moderate, Bad or Very Bad. But you need to have an AmphetaRate account. AmphetaRate is an RSS recommendation server to calculate your personal likes and dislikes of the feed. You can simply login to or make a new account on the Preferences window. You can send your favorites newsfeed to your friend’s email. By default it will bring you to Outlook Express you have, I haven’t see a way to change it to my favorite email client. I also see that the Tutorial came with software is less cognitive, it will need you to click on a link to see the others content. For example is RSSOwl’s How Tos link that will give you a lot of content you need to see, you need to click RSSOwl’s How Tos link again after you clicked on a content before just to see the other contents. I think it will be nice, if they can put some Next or Previous link to see the other content on that Tutorial.

RSSOwl also support proxy network environment, so you don’t need to worry if you are on a proxy network. You can customize the newsfeed to open with your favorite browser, rather than the internal browser one. The Preferences you have can be export and import it again in case you need to re-install your Operating System or the RSSOwl itself. It also has a lot of tools you can use. You can search for a RSS feed, discover feed on a website, or just to validate RSS address on that website. For the search of a RSS feed, I still got no clue what does this do, I mean I tried to put a keyword and it just gave me nothing, though I search for a famous keyword like Linux. Where this search go or referenced to?

Overall this software just do fine with me, I’m keeping to use it and may the owl be with you!

2 Comments »

  1. Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Windows Windows XP

    Thanks for the good feedback!

    Regarding Feed-Search, Version 1.2.2 suffers from a bug that makes the search pretty useless. The new version 1.2.3 will be released in about 1 week, with a fix to this feature.

    Ben

    Comment by Benjamin Pasero — November 19, 2006 @ 6:57 pm
    Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Windows Windows XP

  2. Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Windows Windows XP

    hehehe..english huh!
    anyway, my old fadhilmarus.com is dead!:(( and recenty i’m moving to blog.fadhil.org.:d
    update link gwa yaaa!!!!!

    Comment by fadhil — January 4, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
    Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Windows Windows XP

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