I’ve always had a tough time trying to figure out which RSS readers I should use. Plenty of people have suggested Google reader, but I strongly dislike Google Reader’s user interface. There have been a few RSS readers that I kinda/sorta liked, but the user interface would become difficult to use for trying to view more than a few feeds.

Now, my all-time favorite RSS reader was Findory, but that was shut down in November 2007. Just when I thought I should give up my mad chase for a Findory-like RSS reader, I found Feedly. Feedly is a Firefox extension that makes RSS reading more like a magazine. I love it. Feedly can run on all the platforms that Firefox can run on.

Feedly integrates with Google Reader, which is a big plus. It also attempts to see what you like by importing feeds from FriendFeed and so forth. You can read the Feedly features list for more information. Louis Gray has a more detailed review on Feedly.

I love to use Feedly for a quick scan to find the best blog posts of the day, but for more detailed reading, I prefer Liferea. It is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX (via Macports), and Windows (via Cygwin).

Liferea is nothing like Feedly or Findory. Liferea’s user interface is somewhat similar to those that I’ve disliked, so my first impression of it was not positive. But then I discovered some interesting features in Liferea that I believe make it a useful RSS reader for me.

Below is a screenshot of Liferea. Click on it to view it full size

If you click on the above thumbnail, you’ll notice that I imported my Feedly recommendations into Liferea. This is where it gets good. I import the Google Reader OPML file, containing feed information from Feedly (remember the Google Reader/Feedly integration). Now I have the power of Feedly’s recommended feeds in Liferea’s user interface.

If you click on the above screenshot, you’ll see a line saying, “Also posted in Bret Taylor’s recommendations”. That makes it even easier to use Feedly’s recommended feeds in Liferea. I can see right away that Bret Taylor likes the TechCrunch blog post. Now, the disadvantage to a desktop RSS reader is that you can’t use the RSS reader easily when you are away from that computer.

If I want to easily read my feeds from another computer, I can temporarily live through the user interface of Google Reader.

Now, this blog post was mainly about me and my difficulties with reading lots of feeds. I have found a good desktop RSS reader, a good RSS reader Firefox extension, and a backup in case I want to read RSS from another computer. What I described here, using Liferea and Feedly together, works for me but might not work for you. I only posted this to help perhaps some folks that are like me and might benefit from this setup.

If you want to, describe in the comments how you handle large amounts of RSS feeds.