which rss reader do you use?

      64 Comments on which rss reader do you use?

So, I’m going to try and take a poll here, what program do you use to read RSS / Atom / news feeds? I would have an *actual* poll, but I honestly don’t even know what’s out there, much less what the popular ones are. Please leave a comment if you can.

The reason I ask is because I’m trying to debug some issues with planet — both Gentoo’s and Larry’s.

Oh, and apologies to everyone for breaking Planet Gentoo today. I spent a lot of time cleaning up a *lot* of cruft that should have been fixed for some time now. Chances are, too, that things will only get a bit more misarranged over the next few days as I tweak and test things some more, so bear with me.

Update: jsled had a good comment — why not just look at the access logs? Well, duh, why didn’t I think of that. -_- I don’t have access to Planet Gentoo’s, but Larry breaks it down well enough. It looks like, as far as programs go that are leaving a user agent, akregator is first with 19%, liferea is next with 6%, then Gregarious, RSSOwl and NetNewsWire with all less than 1% each.  The rest are browsers or Unknown.

64 comments on “which rss reader do you use?”

  1. An

    I’m currently using Akregator 1.4.1 with KDE4. I’m not really happy with it’s performance (basically rapes the CPU in my case) but it’s quite well featured and even tho I have tried to replace it countless times I always end up with it.

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  8. jsled

    Google Reader. IIRC, they encode the number of individuals they’re pulling the page for in the user-agent string when they fetch the feed, so accesslogs should reveal this number. The other multi-user aggregators should do the same. As well as FeedBurner re-presented feeds.

    Come to think of it, if you look at the access logs for the feed itself, all the user agent strings together appropriately counted should answer your question better than a poll ever could.

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  10. neyz

    Heh Steve !

    I personally use Akregator. I must admit I haven’t looked too far into readers but for what I use it it satisfies me 🙂

    Cheers and thanks for your work !

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  14. jotik

    Akregator, but I’m seriously thinking of developing a Qt4-only clone with better backend support and probably some more features (analysis for news trends etc).

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  16. IQgryn

    I use Google Reader, which probably barely registers as it only checks the feed once even if a million people use it.

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  20. phreak

    Well, I’m using Gregarius to aggregate all feeds I’m reading into a single one (Firefox is a real bitch with >5 RSS feeds).

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  22. ThaddeusQ

    The problem with using the access logs as mentioned is that some of us get your rss feed through a planet (such as Utah Open Source Planet). The access logs will not show proper information from those planets, will it?

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  28. aurélien

    rss2email in a crontab that post blog posts on an imap account. It’s available anywhere I have an imap client 😉

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  32. robbat2

    You could just ask me to run some stats 😉
    For the rss20.xml files on planet and universe, combined.
    4478246 total hits in the logs.

    Top 10:
    85879 claws
    88308 magpierss
    94903 Firefox/2
    120979 MSIE
    214121 xscreensaver-text
    298291 –
    349319 Firefox/3
    378391 Thunderbird
    806843 liferea
    867487 Akregator

    Top 10 = 73.7% of hits.
    Top 20 = 84.5%
    Top 50 = 95.5% of hits

    I counting the raw distinct useragents first, so I got numbers that way, followed by replacing spaces in the UA string with underscores, and feeding that data to the following sed evil to group UAs together.
    # sed -r -e ‘s,^[[:space:]]*([0-9]+)[[:space:]]+.*(Akregator|Iceweasel|Yahoo!|Googlebot|Planet_Gentoo|Opera|Bloglines|msnbot|Gentoo_Universe|Yandex|Claws|MSIE|xscreensaver-text|Firefox/3|Firefox/2|gnome-vfs|Liferea|Thunderbird|Konqueror/3|Gigabot|Drupal|Netluchs|Yahoo_Pipes|KNewsTicker|Jakarta|PubSub|Charlotte|MagpieRSS|SimplePie|Gregarius|FeedOnFeeds|NetNewsWire|rss2email|Yanga|Feedfetcher-Google|Doubanbot|Rome_Client|WebAlta|Wget/|UniversalFeedParser|Spinn3r|twiceler|violabot|DotBot|Konqueror/4|BonEcho|Firefox/1|Speedy_Spider|FeedDemon|discobot|Safari|Sage-Too|Exabot|voilabot|Biz360|GranParadiso|Minefield|Livejournal|Evolution|NewsGatorOnline|Newsfox|newsbeuter|Ask_Jeeves|Seamonkey|newspipe|YodaoBot|psbot|Okiit|AlestiFeedBot|Mugshot|Reblog|Iceape|Zhuaxia|FeedHub|WordPress|Vienna|BuzzTracker|Swik.net|lynx|Gecko_Gentoo|RSSbandit|Elinks|\<Links|Feed2Imap|Feedjack|ruby-rbot|Netvibes|Sage|RSSOwl|Python-urllib|Feedtools|lwp-trivial|AideRSS|Gecko/200.|curl/|AppleWebKit|Pageflakes|livedoor|\|Fastladder|Blogbridge|Enlightenment|Newsbrain|Sharpreader|xianguo|NewsAlloy|Feedshow|Snownews|Emacs|Attentio|QQFeedFetcher|Gozerbot|Ruby/|Noopod|Newsfire|TechnoratiSnoop|Blogbot|Blorq|Java/|yacybot|heritrix|[a-zA-Z0-9]*RSS(Reader|Feeds)\>|Gecko|BlackBerry|ActiveWeave|Kindle).*$,\1 \2,gi’
    followed by more sorting+counting+sorting.

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  34. gregf

    Used liferea for a long time. Has some speed issues that got to annoying for me. so I switched to google reader.

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  39. remaster

    Google Reader, because it is always synced, no installation required, supports podcasts, easy to use, integrated with other google features and so on ad infinitum… I simply dig it 🙂

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  42. Milan

    Liferea, I prefer desktop app for this, but I will consider google reader when liferea will be able to sync with him.

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  43. Paul de Vrieze

    Google reader. It works on multiple systems and is nicely integrated with the browser for reading the actual articles. I used to use akregator, but besides not supporting shared state between systems (without a shared homedir), it was rather slow, especially to load the actual pages.

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  48. dishi

    Opera-rss feeder, and newsbeuter. Well, i want a console based one, but newsbeuter isn’t really it. So opera for the time being.

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  50. Beetle B.

    Gregarius. Haven’t tried the others. Wanted a web based one on my server so that I could access it elsewhere. But in the end, I just access it from home anyway…

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  51. Rich

    Google reader here. I’d actually prefer something I had more control over, but it has to support being accessed from anywhere (phone, web, etc). Google reader is the option that works best. RNews would be my second choice but Google Reader works much better on Android…

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  59. Mike Nerone

    Your log scrub is clearly missing Google Reader. The majority of everyone I know who uses an aggregator uses GReader.

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