For PC owners who like reading blogs I’d like to point you to RSS Bandit. It’s a program I started using a couple of months ago to track and read my favourite blogs.
Obviously those of you with Macs have other software you can use, but as a PC user I’ve found RSS Bandit has been great. One of its best features is that it downloads blog posts to your computer so that you can read them offline. As many of you know I travel a fair bit and I now often get caught up on a number of my blogs while flying. Very handy. Obviously just having all your blogs in one place is itself pretty handy – better still, keeping track of the posts you’ve read and those you haven’t is also helpful.
Oh, and as a bonus, it is both free and open source.
Of course, if any of my intrepid readers have found other blogging software they like please let me know, or better yet, post a comment.
eaves.ca 
Personally I use Opera. Granted, its newsfeed reader is relatively basic (no categorization, only room for so many individual feeds before it starts encroaching on e-mail space, difficult as all hell to apply custom styles to, etc, etc), but since its introduction in Opera 8.0 (correct me if I’m wrong; was it 7.5?) it has only gotten better. In any case I like that newsfeed items are treated almost as if they were mail messages; it’s all rather natural.
Personally I use Opera. Granted, its newsfeed reader is relatively basic (no categorization, only room for so many individual feeds before it starts encroaching on e-mail space, difficult as all hell to apply custom styles to, etc, etc), but since its introduction in Opera 8.0 (correct me if I’m wrong; was it 7.5?) it has only gotten better. In any case I like that newsfeed items are treated almost as if they were mail messages; it’s all rather natural.
Thanks Dave, I think we don’t do enough spontaneous “plugging” of some of the applications that make our lives easier!
I will definetly give RSS Bandit a try!
In return…a recommendation I have for you since you are on the road a lot is to buy a Sony e-reader (PRS-505) I have the first generation and quite frankly couldn’t live without it…you can also upload your RSS feeds to it…this would be right up your alley!
Thanks Dave, I think we don’t do enough spontaneous “plugging” of some of the applications that make our lives easier! I will definetly give RSS Bandit a try!In return…a recommendation I have for you since you are on the road a lot is to buy a Sony e-reader (PRS-505) I have the first generation and quite frankly couldn’t live without it…you can also upload your RSS feeds to it…this would be right up your alley!
Looks like an interesting little gadget, Patrice. How does it fare with PDFs, exactly? Is it usable for simple documents?
Looks like an interesting little gadget, Patrice. How does it fare with PDFs, exactly? Is it usable for simple documents?
RSS Bandit is a decent program.
Depending on which Mozilla product you prefer staring at both Thunderbird and Firefox come with RSS aggregators that do all that RSS bandit does (offline browsing, read/unread, folder-organization).
Sage is a plugin for FireFox, available here:
http://sage.mozdev.org/
Thunderbird 3 (in Alpha) has RSS aggregation out-of-the-box and treats it similarly to email (including the ability to forward posts).
Another tip, especially useful for those who use multiple computers, is to have your blogs aggregated first in a web-based aggregator (like Google Reader) that can generate a “personalized” RSS feed to which you subscribe with your aggregator application.
This ensures that no matter which computer you’re using you have access to your blog list – and also makes a single point of configuration; rather than adding the same blog to each of your workstations.
RSS Bandit is a decent program.Depending on which Mozilla product you prefer staring at both Thunderbird and Firefox come with RSS aggregators that do all that RSS bandit does (offline browsing, read/unread, folder-organization).Sage is a plugin for FireFox, available here: http://sage.mozdev.org/Thunderbird 3 (in Alpha) has RSS aggregation out-of-the-box and treats it similarly to email (including the ability to forward posts).Another tip, especially useful for those who use multiple computers, is to have your blogs aggregated first in a web-based aggregator (like Google Reader) that can generate a “personalized” RSS feed to which you subscribe with your aggregator application. This ensures that no matter which computer you’re using you have access to your blog list – and also makes a single point of configuration; rather than adding the same blog to each of your workstations.