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1/11/2008 -- While I rarely get excited over free applications, the KDE news-feed reader Akregator is proving to be an exception to the rule. This simple tool has made my life so much better that it's difficult to talk about it without sounding like a late-night infomercial for OxiClean.
Akregator, with its seeming addiction to news and blogs, lets me have all the feeds I want appear in a simple interface that's so intuitive you can figure it out in seconds. It also lessens my dependence on iGoogle and frees me from visiting sites manually.
Figure 1 shows the normal view; you can also opt for a Combined View that replaces the article listings with a listing of all the articles beneath the feed in a single window.
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| Figure 1. The normal view in Akregator. |
You can add a feed by choosing the menu option shown in Figure 2, filling in the URL and choosing to accept the cookie(s), as shown in Figure 3. In figures 2 and 3, the feed being added is for DistroWatch.com.
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| Figure 2. To add a feed, first choose that option from the menu. |
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| Figure 3. The second step to adding a feed is specifying the address and choosing to accept the cookie(s). |
After you specify the feed, you can then configure the parameters for it, as shown in Figure 4.
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| Figure 4. Specify the feed parameters. |
Figure 5 shows the new feed added to the others and available for viewing. The articles are sorted with the most current feeds at the top.
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| Figure 5. The process of adding the new feed is complete. |
If you don't set the update interval, feeds are fetched every 30 minutes -- you can always override this by choosing to "update now" from the menu -- and all the archives are kept. You can customize the archiving by number (only keep the most recent 200, for example) or by date (only keep articles within the past week), or you can disable all archiving and see only what's current.
Akregator supports both RSS and Atom feeds. Articles that haven't been read appear in either red or blue; they change to black after they've been read. You can create folders to group together similar feeds (economics, news, Linux, etc.). By default, the KDE Web browser (Konqueror) is used for all external browsing when you click on a link, but you can change this to any browser you're comfortable with.
The latest version of Akregator is 1.2.7 and was released under the GNU GPLv2 license. If your Linux distribution doesn't include this fantastic tool, you'll find it as part of the KDE PIM package that you can download here.
I strongly encourage you to experiment with this tool. You'll be hooked once you do, and you'll wonder how you ever managed to get by without it.
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