On any given day, I might bounce around three different computers and use usually two to three operating systems. One thing that drives me crazy about this is managing my RSS feed subscriptions&8212;of which I have quite a few. I’ve tried various readers like Sage, Bloglines, Firefox’s live bookmarks and my personal favorite, KDE’s Akregator. It’s always the case that while one RSS feed has one necessary feature, it lacks another. So, I keep trying new aggregators. Enter Newshutch.

Right now, my biggest peeve is keeping my feeds synced with where I happen to be, so that news I’ve read on one computer with one aggregator won’t show as unread on another machine. I really hate it. As I mentioned above, I’ve played with Bloglines, which is web-based and was about to give it another try when I heard about Newshutch. In all honesty, it’s really no different from Bloglines in functionality except for some fancy Ajax action. I like the look of it and appreciate the 21st century feel Ajax brings. There’s no notifier apps/extensions to use, which is a downer and feeds update every thirty minutes. I uploaded my OPML file, importing my feed list and am willing to give it a try for a couple weeks.

Someday, someone will make the better aggregator. One that’s either web-based or synchronizable between computers, has a decent notification system where the user can tweak individual feed update schedules and delivers feeds attractively or at least lets you edit a CSS file to display them with. Someday.

Addendum
After using Newshutch for a couple hours, I’ve left it behind and am now back using Bloglines. Newshutch is too damn clunky and slow for any real usage, unfortunately.

What with my recent switch to KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve been playing around with the host of new programs available at my beck and apt-get. True I could easily have run many, if not all the KDE oriented programs I wanted under Gnome, but since I was all up in that Gnome-ness, I never really bothered even looking.

Out of all these new applications, one that has immediately become one of my all-time favorites is Akregator, the RSS feed aggregator for KDE.

Akregator is hands down the best damn RSS app I’ve ever used. For the past couple of years, I’ve been eschewing desktop programs for the Firefox extension Sage due in main part to the fact that none of the apps I ever tried out had usefulness that warranted running a separate program to browse feeds. Sage was simple, light and worked well at what it was supposed to do. It also worked from within Firefox. The downside was that Sage did not automatically fetch feeds. I had to manually check them, which I didn’t like. If I have to manually check, I almost might as well just visit the site.

Akregator sits in my task bar and I’ve set it up to check all my forty of fifty feeds every three minutes. Feeds can be prioritized, and customized with special notifications, archiving—all kinds of wacky, mind-bending shit. It’s just about everything I’ve ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

If you can manage running it, get it. When you do, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and die happy.