By Jack M. Germain
LinuxInsider, 06/13/12 5:00 AM PT
In a world in which mobile is getting bigger
every day, desktop news aggregators might appear to be a vestige of a
bygone time. But for those who still prefer to get news on the big
screen, Liferea is a great way to go. Its installation process is
simple, as is its feature set.
Linux Feed Reader,
aka "Liferea," is part of a highly specialized category of apps. It is
an aggregator for online news feeds, weblogs and podcasts. As such, it
provides a tool for pulling into one spot an eclectic collection of your
newsfeed content so you do not have to go to each separate source.
Liferea
The Liferea project puts its focus on simple installation and simple
usage. This app achieves these two goals handily. If you do not have
specialized needs that go beyond merely reading a list of aggregated
news items, then Liferea's simplicity will suit your purposes handily.
But more demanding fans of Internet news delivery may find Liferea's
lack of advanced features a deal-breaker. Even if you do not mind the
feature dearth, you might find Liferea's penchant for fussy performance a
turn off.
Chances are that Liferea will run just fine on your Linux-powered
computer. But based on a continuing stream of user feedback on numerous
forums, this app has a track record for crashing or otherwise bogging
down under the strain of tracking high volumes of news feeds.
I have used Liferea on numerous desktop and laptop Linux boxes
running Ubuntu and Linux Mint configurations with good results. Followup
reports by disheartened users indicate that the various tweaks
mentioned in support forums solve a majority of the performance issues.
To its credit, the developer's website
openly encourages user trouble reports so the issues can be remedied.
Aging Usefulness
Software such as Liferea is a vestige from the pre-mobile device era. If
you only rely on traditional computing hardware to access
Internet-based news, then apps like Liferea are a godsend.
But if you also feed your appetite for online news using smartphones
and tablets, more sophisticated types of aggregator apps make the
process much more streamlined and handy. If you use both types of access
devices, however, you will continuously trip over duplications. Few, if
any, solutions exist yet to synchronize news feeds on multiple devices.
Some of the aggregator options available besides Liferea include
Akregator,
Blam and
RSSOwl.
You can try to integrate your list of news feed sources using the
Feedly extension for Firefox and Chrome. This add-on shows all of your
news feeds in a more appealing page format.
Getting It
One of my growing irritations with the package management systems that
Linxu distros use is the delay in making the latest releases available.
The delay with Liferea seems to be a bigger gap than usual on both
Ubuntu and Mint systems.
For example, the version both of these distros have in their
repositories is 1.6.6. But the developer in late March released stable
version 1.8.3 with significant feature improvements.
So to enjoy maximum benefit from Liferea, bypass the one-click
installation from your distro's software center and go directly to the
developer's download source
here. There you will find easy-to-execute directions for entering get and install commands into a terminal window.
Getting Started
Once you have Liferea installed, run it by clicking the program's name
from the Internet software group on the menu. If you are using Ubuntu's
Unity interface or the standard GNOME 3.x desktop, Liferea will be
automatically added to the icon lists for Applications. You can add it
to the Favorites bar as well.
I found Liferea as easy to use as the touch-and-read news feed apps
on my Android mobile devices. The app opens to the main program window.
The default settings start feed updates immediately.
The user interface is very streamlined -- so much so, that it does
not look like the typical display containing traditional drop-down menus
and icon row or tool bars.
Instead, the menu items are specific to adding new feed subscriptions
and navigating from the current displayed news item to the next one in
the main viewing window. The left column of the app window lists the
current feed subscriptions.
Using It
The Liferea interface is literally click and read. Just click the news
feed source in the left column. The individual articles from that feed
display in the right pane.
At the bottom of the source list is a metafolder of all unread items.
This makes it easy to quickly scan through all the unread articles
rather than scrolling through specific individual sources.
It is easy to add new feeds. All you do is click on the "Add Subscription" button. Then enter either the full website
URL or the
RSS
feed address. Liferea does all the heavy lifting. In a second or two,
the newly added news feed source appears in the list as its contents is
updated.
Out of the box, so to speak, Liferea gets the job done. For instance,
the Subscriptions menu provides a list of quick actions. These include
import/export news feeds and creating new folders.
Handy Features
Other menu categories make it simple to change viewing options, change
the read/unread status, and set preferences. I particularly like the
ability to integrate some key sources into the news feed mix. You do
this through the Subscriptions/New Source menu. This accomplishes two
things.
One is the integration of blogrolls or Planets into your feed list.
Liferea automatically adds/removes feeds according to the changes of the
source OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) document. Other
supported formats are: RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom and OCS.
The other is the ability to integrate the feed list of your Google
(Nasdaq: GOOG) Reader account. This is a very easy way to synchronize
your feed list and reading lists from Google Reader.
Advanced Tool
Liferea does a good job with the basic tools. But it lags behind other aggregators when it comes to advanced features.
One of the few advanced features is script manager in the Tools menu.
This lets you add custom scripts that run whenever a certain action
occurs.
Scripting as a customization option is something that typical users
will not need. But if you want to push Liferea to the limit, the script
manager will let you do it.
One More Thing
Be sure to go through the seven setup panels in Tools/Preferences. The
default settings will work just fine. But a variety of choices lets you
fine-tune how you work with Liferea.
The preferences options include the choice of viewing browser. The
default is the GNOME Browser, which by all standards is weak. But it
works.
If you use the Google Chrome browser, though, you are out of luck. It
is not included. Your choices are limited to Firefox, Opera, Epiphany,
Konqueror, and the X-Browser.
Bottom Line
Liferea will find and present all of your designated news postings. You
will not get bogged down in complicated feature choices. For typical
news gathering and reading needs, you will not need anything more.
Jack M. Germain has been writing about computer
technology since the early days of the Apple II and the PC. He still has
his original IBM PC-Jr and a few other legacy DOS and Windows boxes. He
left shareware programs behind for the open source world of the Linux
desktop. He runs several versions of Windows and Linux OSes and often
cannot decide whether to grab his tablet, netbook or Android smartphone
instead of using his desktop or laptop gear.
Source:
http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/75360.html
