GROUP TEST RSS AGGREGATORS RSS AGGREGATORS GROUP TEST Marco Fioretti explores five different ways to get news from the internet, and explains why you need RSS On Test RSS Aggregators All the news you want, without Big Brother. Akregator URL www.kde.org his Group Test may be the news you may want to see in one Version 4.12.5 most important you read window, without jumping from Licence GPL v2 Tthis year, because RSS is website to website. The aggregator from and vital, both for you and for the web The others are independence and for the KDE desktop. Does as a whole. Seriously. privacy. As long as all the websites it work well even in other RSS means Rich Site Summary you care about publish RSS feeds environments? or, some say, Really Simple and you use them, those websites Syndication. A standard RSS feed is don’t run the risk of seeing Liferea a plain text file that always contains themselves penalised by private URL http://lzone.de/ the latest headlines from the search engines and social liferea website that publishes it. In networks, which have their own Version 1.10.8 Licence GPLv2+ practice, an RSS feed may contain scoring algorithms and priorities. At A GTK, that is Gnome- text and links to any kind of the same time, you never become oriented application with resource, from local log files to dependant on any external service many features and plugins. streamed music. (remember all the complaints last RSS aggregators download the year when Google Reader closed? Newsbeuter feeds that their users want and THAT is what we’re talking about!). URL http://newsbeuter.org present all their contents in one Above all, nobody else gets (at least Version 2.8 coherent view, making it possible to with self-hosted, web-based Licence MIT read many stories from many aggregators) one single lists of all This RSS aggregator for sources, very efficiently. the “news” you like to read on a the console is at least The reasons why RSS is vital are regular basis, so RSS can be a great as rich in features as the very simple. The most obvious, and help in keeping the web a place of others. less important, is to save time: with many independent publishers and QuiteRSS a good aggregator you get all the readers. Please use RSS! URL http://quiterss.org Version 0.15.4 In practice,an RSS feed may contain Licence GPLv3 “ A multiplatform text and links to any kind of resource.” aggregator, with a flexible, easy-to-use category and tagging system. THE CRUCIAL CRITERIA We wanted to make trying RSS first category are the fastest, and may Tiny Tiny RSS aggregators as easy as possible. This be perfect for users with disabilities. URL http://tt-rss.org led us to exclude interesting packages Web-based tools, instead, only have be Version 1.12 like SnowNews or RSSOwl, which installed once to be usable from any seemed to be available as binary browser, on any computer. Licence: GPLv3 packages in the default repositories of Other important criteria were A web-based aggregator fewer distributions than others. active development, documentation, ready for the cloud and At the same time, we absolutely had efficient news browsing and support perfectly integrated with to show you how many options you for multimedia enclosures. Features your main browser. have, from command line aggregators like news tagging were also tested, but to web-based ones. Programs in the treated as slightly less relevant. 54 www.linuxvoice.com RSS AGGREGATORS GROUP TEST Sharing feeds Multimedia Can I pass interesting news to all my friends? Lots of stories don’t come as text. Can I still get them? ews doesn’t have to be plain text. Therefore, an RSS aggregator that Ndoesn’t know what to make of multimedia content is not worth much. As with other functionalities, Tiny Tiny RSS is the easiest contender to talk about. Since you must use it from a browser, you will access only the non-text content that your browser already knows how to handle. You may think that Newsbeuter, being a console application, would be even quicker to deal with, but you would be wrong, at least for audio and other content marked according to the Media RSS extension (www.rssboard.org/ media-rss). As it happens, Newsbeuter is developed and distributed with a twin application called Podbeuter, which works both as a download manager and, above all, as a podcast player. Akregator, Liferea and QuiteRSS all Liferea (in the back) knows how to submit links to tens of online communities. Tiny Tiny RSS downloaded and played the audio podcast we (front bottom) generates RSS feeds of all the news you want to share. tried from our test suite of feeds. Video playback depends on which combination of ood RSS aggregators can easily when they are not available. A common aggregator, Linux distro, installed multimedia pass single articles on many other way is to create and manage OPML lists codecs, configuration and content you want to Gchannels with one click, as well as or single, custom feeds with Tiny Tiny manage. We cannot guarantee that any of the whole lists of feeds. RSS, optionally protected by passwords, desktop aggregators will be able to play The open standard called Outline and then read them with any desktop- whatever video you may find online. However, Processor Markup Language (OPML, based aggregator. Newsbeuter and Liferea there is a quick and dirty solution: whatever http://dev.opml.org/spec2.html) was support this integration with Tiny Tiny your desktop aggregator is, tell it to pass the created just for the second type of RSS (or with Reedah and TheOldReader) article that contains the troublesome content sharing. An OPML file is a plain text, out of the box, and even with the others to your main browser, which of course you will hierarchical list of URLs of RSS feeds. All it’s quite simple. Independent instances of have already configured with all the plugins the aggregators described here can Tiny Tiny RSS may even directly link to you need. import and export such lists. each other in this way. With Newsbeuter, you need to pass it an Liferea can save feeds to heaps of online OPML file with the -i option the first time communities; Newsbeuter can save you run it, if you want to avoid complaints. bookmarked articles to an external file or Feeds in nested folders will get tags with in your del.icio.us account. QuiteRSS sits the same hierarchical structure. somewhere in the middle: its default Newsbeuter also supports what is called “share” menu has email, Evernote, Google “OPML online subscription mode”: give it Plus, Facebook, Twitter and a few other the URLs of one or more OPML lists, and it services. Tiny Tiny RSS has plugins for will dynamically (re)load all the feeds they sharing news via email or services like contain every time you launch it. Flattr, Google+, Pinterest or Identica, but QuiteRSS makes the best job of playing RSS In general, both single users and small you may find it more convenient to use the podcasts, but the others are also up to the task. organisations can keep in synch, or bookmarklets provided by those websites. distribute, their newsfeeds using VERDICT combinations of the programs presented VERDICT Akregator Liferea here. You and all your partners can enjoy Akregator Newsbeuter Liferea the greater speed and desktop integration QuiteRSS Newsbeuter Tiny Tiny RSS QuiteRSS of a native aggregator on your computers, Tiny Tiny RSS and still access the same set of feeds www.linuxvoice.com 55 GROUP TEST RSS AGGREGATORS News management User interface How will it fit my workflow? Navigation, search, filters… o you frequently print interesting The boxes that follow try to give you a heoretically, a good RSS aggregator news for offline reading? very general idea of how each of the displays news when and how you DAkregator, which integrates the selected aggregators looks, feels and Twant, and enables you to browse very KDE printing panel, may be the best works under the hood. You should use quickly. It also supports flexible classification option. Need to process news with other this information to figure out how each of feeds and articles, as well as search and tools? Go with Newsbeuter, which may be tool would integrate with your own filtering. In practice, some of these features run within scripts, or Tiny Tiny RSS which current Linux desktop and system may be irrelevant for you. An avid reader who can store everything into a database. maintenance routines. doesn’t care about archiving, for example, would have little use for categorisation and search interfaces. Akregator Navigation is very simple in all aggregators. Akregator is the main, if not the official that makes the configuration tweaks that Newsbeuter is the fastest, thanks to its textual RSS aggregator of the KDE desktop. people most frequently want easier to do: interface and its many bandwidth-saving Printing and integration with your Kontact the commands to change fonts, font size tricks. Tiny Tiny RSS is only as fast and address book are incorporated within it. and colours are very simple to find and responsive as the link between its host Depending on your taste, you may find its use. Configuration of keyboard shortcuts computer and your browser. default interface and layout dull or is equally effortless. Even some less Liferea and Akregator provide the most unobtrusive and efficient. While it’s hard to common operations, like playing audio or options for opening links: by themselves, or remember its looks, or be impressed by pop-up windows to signal the arrival of passing them to new tabs or windows of them, Akregator is also the RSS interface more headlines, are self explanatory.