That’s right boys and girls, I got an RSS reader. For those who don’t know, many sites nowadays put up “RSS feeds”, which, basically, is a page that’s hosted on a website in a special format that a special reader can access. The reader can then determine whether or not there’s any new content on the website in question (Most RSS feeds actually include the new item itself). I chose FeedDemon to supply me with all my news needs. There’re a LOT of RSS feeds that are available by default, enough to keep any newsie supplied. You can even sort all your feeds into sections that make sense (so, for example, you don’t have the plane crash beside the lawyer jokes. You can have a humor and a news section). I really need to take some time to cull out ones that I don’t want/need. It’s pretty cool to have all this information from around the net at my fingertips.

I got this reader about 2 weeks ago. I haven’t used it since. The program’s layout is crap. I’d want it to be laid out like Windows Explorer is, with each news “section” as a sperate folder. Instead, it hides them all in a dropdown box that gives no indication of whether or not there’re any new stories in them, so you have to MANUALLY go through each section to check for new updates. This wouldn’t be so bad except in your default configuration you’ve go something like 12 sections (that’s after I’d cut out about 3 completely). If there was a folder type view then there could be an indicator beside it so that, at a glance, you could see if there was anything new in there (think the folder view Hotmail uses). I found it to be a large pain. Maybe I’ll try again with another program, but for me the RSS reader didn’t make my life faster or easier.