Are you reading daily news on internet? Technology, local news, other interests, detector-pro RSS.. Always opening new browsers, writing address and also reading non-important news?! If the answer is yes, try Liferea – open source news aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use and easy to install news aggregator for Linux. Liferea is a very easy to use RSS feed reader which offers basic, but useful features for managing your subscriptions. Unfortunately, you won’t find fancy features such as integration with web browsers, adaptive filters, you won’t be able to post on a blog and so on. On the other hand, Liferea is very fast, clean and elegant compared to other aggregators.

Liferea it’s a popular application, and there is packages for most of the Linux distros. This means that you will be able to install Liferea through your package manager.

On your Ubuntu system go to Applications/Add/Remove, an in the search field enter Liferea! This will install the program with default subscriptions like Ubuntu fridge, planet Ubuntu and other..
Creating a new subscription is a easy process, all you’ll need to do is press the “New subscription” button from the toolbar or from the Feeds menu and enter the feed address into the text box. example: (http://feeds.feedburner.com/detector). After successfully creating a subscription, you’ll be able to change the feed proprieties by right clicking it and selecting the appropriate button. Usually, there’s no need to change a feed’s proprieties unless it needs HTTP authentication or other feed specific options.

Liferea can be customized from the Preferences window, which can be opened by pressing the “Preferences” button on the toolbar or from the Program menu. The preferences window is divided into seven tabs: feeds, folders, headlines, browser, GUI, proxy and enclosures. The feeds tab allows you to change basic feed-related options such as the default number of items to be saved in each subscription or the feed update interval. From the folders tab, you can change the way feeds are loaded once a subscription has been selected. With browser tab you can configure several options related to the internal and external browser. GUI tab is for enabling the system tray icon and set whether you’d like to be announced when new headlines are downloaded or not. The proxy tab contains proxy-related options. Liferea also allows you to select the appropriate media player used for playing each media format downloaded from a news item.

Some features:

• RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, OPML.
• Filters to scrape websites or postprocess feeds.
• Supports Enclosures (Podcasting).
• Bandwidth saving by supporting feed specified update intervals, HTTP compression and etags.

Planned features in new versions:

• Google Reader integration

There are a few important RSS related functions which are missing such as easy to use filters. and there are only few options to personalize liferea like change the font used for displaying selected headlines.

And at the end, Liferea is a really simple, clean, fast and quite powerful RSS Linux reader.

Link: http://liferea.sourceforge.net/index.htm

Tags | Internet, Linux, RSS Feeds, Software, Technology News, Ubuntu