Personal experience: the benefits of "independent" RSS-reader

A subjective story about how I became a QuiteRSS user.

My acquaintance with QuiteRSS happened in December 2012: a regular RSS reader of the Opera on Win7 x64 sagged from over two hundred tapes, and the total eating of the RAM in the background jarred me. In the meantime, I tried with a dozen different readers, from Feed Demon to the monstrous Omea Reader. FeedReader, RSSXpress, RSSOwl. Either I didn’t figure it out, or they just didn’t suit me, or I demanded a lot. Unless did not drive RSS in mail clients yes various PIM'ah. However, nothing prevented me from the "Opera". Which and how the browser gradually began to fade. What happened afterwards - we know perfectly well: moving to Blink, which overwhelmed the community of “operatives”, and the painful search for alternatives. Someone had such a crossroads last summer, someone later. And since I love “heavy” websites, including those with a craft debt (you have to keep track of a lot of news sites-media-blogs), the “brakes” of the old Presto led to the need to diversify the business long before the improvement of the browser’s past engine. I do not need access to RSS every hour, but somehow I didn’t want to keep several hundred megabytes in the background. Given that without that, I constantly keep open with a dozen tabs. In addition, I am still not a supporter of simultaneous sitting in several browsers, so the scheme “12th“ Opera ”for light sites, something“ chromium ”for social networks, video, and so on. “Ballast” I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :)

Meanwhile, the new "Opera" got rid of the mail client, selecting it in a separate program. A weighty argument confirming the correctness of my move to a discrete RSS aggregator. Nevertheless, I will not hide, the dramatic changes in the concept of "Opera" 15.xx gave more than one reason to take heart.

I found out about QuiteRSS by chance. Whether while surfing software sites, or while reading comments on one of these resources, I came across the mention of this reader. Downloaded the portable version 0.11. I tested it and decided to write a review for the project mail, since the developers turned out to be our compatriots, Alexey Khokhryakov and Yegor Shilyaev. At that time, the program satisfied only an unpretentious user, and even compared to “Opera”, where there was almost everything in the world ... Ah, this is an excellent tagging system, which could easily and gracefully adjust to your tasks, without drowning in the sea incoming rss feeds! .. and unmatched. Almost. She was the one who kept me in “Opera” before I migrated to QuiteRSS.
')
However, without regard to that glorious Norwegian web browser QuiteRSS is not bad: it is based on the WebKit engine and has a fairly easy interface that can be customized. As well as a portable version for Windows, build for Linux, translated into dozens of languages. Links from the news can be viewed in the built-in browser or transferred to the external one via PCM, or from the reader to “shuffle” to your favorite social networks. The most important thing is the free program. Although feedback from the developers is a reason to think about donating to the needs of the project. Why? Next you will understand.

Alexey responded to my letter. In QuiteRSS there were no labels (shortcuts), it was impossible to mark a message with a single click of the LMB to read the message. And the appearance of the news column should be corrected, hiding the extra columns and increasing the width of the others. Compare: and However, soon, after two months, both tags appeared ( more precisely, categories; you can create your own, customize the icons for them and the colors of the marked messages ), and the daw for the read. Then I transferred my tree of tapes to this reader. Until about the autumn of last year, some specific tapes were clumsily updated in the program. This is not surprising given my appetites. The essence of the matter, all of last year, I periodically discussed their offspring with the developers, making rationalization proposals. Some of the ideas deviated, but much more was taken on the pencil. For example, links to media files appeared in the aggregator if the RSS feed contains them. So it became much easier for me to control the activity on music portals, in particular on PromoDJ. I just connected RSS with Soundcloud; in a roundabout way, true, but under the conditions of time trouble and everyday rush, it is still more comfortable to scroll through a dozen messages headers, rather than crawl to the site and there already browse dozens of flash elements (who used, will understand :)). In March 2013, QuiteRSS learned how to save pictures from received messages. Then he learned how to automatically filter "correspondence" and assign the specified labels to messages that contain the specified words . It would seem a lotion to an amateur, but if one of your streams is updated frequently and you do not have time to track the necessary news in it, then this filtering will greatly facilitate your work with the program. However, in contrast to the 12th "Opera», QuiteRSS has not yet mastered the search on the whole tree of tapes.

When updating, the program makes a backup of the database and config file. If suddenly what goes wrong, you can not worry about the safety of personal RSS-wealth. For example, I will not go far. On Friday, I decided to install a fresh release of 0.15, but he stubbornly did not see my tape tree and destroyed the main database. I reported this to the developers, and it turned out that QuiteRSS did not want to process the request to the database file, because the path to the folder contained an apostrophe. Fortunately, the problem was resolved promptly: the release of 0.15.1 was published the same day; and the accumulation of messages "returned" to the program due to the backup. You can reasonably argue - they say, you need to back up yourself “for every fireman”. Well, I will answer only that for approximately the last six months, QuiteRSS did not have any falls. But it is worth considering that the reader still did not get out on the "iron" stable release with version 1.xx. Although starting from 0.15, the interface has changed: the menu bar has given way (in all senses) to a tiny button that nestles near the tab bar, the main toolbar has also disappeared, because the main icons can be added to the ribbon bar and hot keys are available.


For the near (or not) future, the implementation of synchronization with the "cloud" is planned. At first it will be TT-RSS, and then, perhaps, it comes to Feedly. To the two-or three-column appearance will join the news show in the manner of a newspaper page. Other cosmetic changes are expected, whether it be news filters or program notifications.

In addition to the site , which briefly describes the latest releases, and the local forum, QuiteRSS has a good tracker . From it you can find out which bugs are planned to be fixed first, vote for existing suggestions for improving the interface, or write your own.

Of course, I miss a couple of trifles from the time of the 12th “Opera”. For example, by grouping news based on publication date. Something is missing in the functionality of "sabzh": say, clever work with the cache. Despite the advantages of the WebKit platform, QuiteRSS with excitement takes about 300 ± 50 MB of RAM to my tree of tapes, moreover, it contains under three hundred channels with varying degrees of intensity. There are restrictions and RSS. Generally speaking, nowadays not all sites after redesigns, etc. of repair work are left by RSS-streams, more and more often moving to social networks ... I also dream about the appearance of a universal comprehensive reader: for PDF and FB2 to read, scroll through news, make notes on those or other messages, add something to the bookmarks, which would then be sent to the server and joined to the "Favorites" of the browser.

Anyway, right now you have to be content with what you have. And there is, in my opinion, a lot. QuiteRSS impressively handles the processing and cataloging of my RSS feed. Through a simple download manager you can download podcasts or files, through a mini-browser you can watch news and even surf the sites. Moreover, the reader now supports AdBlock purging of ads. The requests for RSS readers are different for us, along with the consumption of RSS feeds. One is enough for 2-5 threads and browser extensions, while others give a motley combine and so that it does not hang out from half a thousand constantly updated subscriptions. In the middle is QuiteRSS. Or maybe not in the middle - you know better.