If there is one area where the Linux desktop has done very well, it has to be the variety of solutions for subscribing to RSS feeds that has been made available to us. In this piece, I will be sharing some of these applications and my thoughts on them.

Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds.

I recently discovered Liferea, an RSS reader/aggregator that uses Mozilla’s xulrunner as its web browsing engine. Its interface resembles that of a mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird (a.k.a. icedove), and it works in much the same way, marking items as read when you click on them. Here’s a screen shot of Liferea in action:

RSS is a set of XML-based formats to describe articles (including title, link to the original article, description, etc.) which are usually transported via the HTTP protocol. These days, the majority of blogs and news websites provide RSS feeds. In order to read these feeds in a useful way, special programs, called RSS feed readers or RSS aggregators, can be used.