One of the ways you can read the feeds you are subscribed to is to use desktop-based feed readers. There are multiple types of such feed readers for Windows, for Macintosh or for Linux. If you prefer using programs on your desktop, this step can help you how to get the best out of them.

Web based feed readers are more popular than the desktop-based ones, but they provide some advantages as well.

1. You can access your feeds by using software that takes advantage of the platform you’re using.


2. Most web-based readers cannot subscribe to secure feeds.


3. You can browse your feeds offline.


4. You can use the internal browser of your feed reader.


5. Their speed is often better as performance has become a better recently.


6. You can refresh your feeds manually.


7. You can customize the way you read and organize feeds.

Let's see some particular examples.

FeedDemon helps you bring the power of RSS to your Windows desktop. It's easy to set up custom news watches based on keywords and to download podcasts and audio files. The best feature is that it synchronizes with NewsGator Online which means you can use the program on different computers.


The main page of Newsgator.com

First download the software for free.



Feeddemon downloads articles and prefetches the images they contain and the pages they link to so you can work offline as well.

Now let's subscribe to the RSS feed of the New England Journal of Medicine.



Always look for the RSS logo (LOGO).

Click on Article feeds:



Choose what kind of articles you would like to follow (most viewed, most cited, current ones, etc.) and click on its link.



It's your choice whether to use iGoogle, My Yahoo, Bloglines or other services; or you can insert the url of the newly created RSS feed into your feedreader. This time I will insert the link of feed into Feeddemon. So copy the link:



Click on the Subscribe button in your feed reader tool, insert the link and click on next or ok. It means it is now added to the list of journals you follow. You let the information come to you automatically.





Some features include the panic button that you can press when you're overwhelmed with new feeds,



Click on Prefetch Items for Offline Reading when you cannot work online but want to see the images and other content of the articles.

Feedreader is a free RSS news aggregator that provides a user-friendly environment. Web content can be accessed and distributed at any time, to and from any location.



After downloading and installing it for free, Click on File/ Add/ Feed then insert the link of the RSS feed. Click Ok and you are ready.





The left sidebar contains the names of sites you are subscribed to, and you can read the articles in the rigth box.

SharpReader RSS aggregator is another easy-to-use desktop-based feed reader, but you need to install the .NET Framework, version 2.0 or version 1.1 SP1 in order to use it.

NetNewsWire is a desktop-based feed reader program created for Macintosh users. It's free to download and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or greater.

Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is a news aggregator for online feeds. If you want to use other feed readers for Linux, those require many extra libraries to be installed.

But there are some free Unix aggregators as well: Akregator (KDE), RSSOwl (Java), Straw (Python).




There is an extended list of desktop based feed readers on Metacentric and another on Blogspace in case you would like to try out something else.