aKregator: News Feeds at Your Finger Tips!

I just came across a really cool program that I think everyone who reads news, from a site that provides rss/rdf, to cut down on the time taken by browsing the endless websites. The program is called aKregator. This program will add in URL’s to rss/rdf xml files provided by these news sites and create a clean, simple interface for browsing through the summaries provided by these sites. So if you could imagine the KDE New Ticker and put that into a program that is viewed like an email program.Sound kinda kewl? I thought so and have been very happy with the product over the time that I’ve used it. It uses OPML/XML files, which is a standard for documenting and notating lists of rss/rdf url’s, which also allows you interoperability between a the Gnome equivalent of the program called Liferea.  Both are very impressive products in their own right, while KDE makes use of all the konqueror capabilities and takes a view similar to kmail, Liferea makes use of GTKHtml & Gnome’s default browser (unfortunately as of 0.5.9, it still loaded to old gnome browser – which I can’t even remember the name of any more – and not epiphany). Both applications allow you the capability if indicating such features as loading the pages within the programs viewer (another tab, just like Konqueror can do with you press CTRL-T or CTRL-N), or by an external browser, and update intervals. One thing I found of interest is their attempt at getting Kontact plugin implements, so you can view the “Feeds” via the task icons in Kontact. Unfortunately at this time, clicking on the feeds plugin causes a segment fault (KDE 3.2.3 + aKregator 1.0 Beta3). If they clean that up by the final release of 1.0, I’m going to be a very happy feed reading camper! I highly recommend aKregator, and Liferea for the gnome crowd, for you news reading needs!