Make Need-to-Read Blogs Even Easier to Find

Weblogs aren't just for geeks anymore--and the right Mac software can help you enjoy them more efficiently.

Rebecca Freed, special to PC World

Comments or questions? Drop a line to The Mac Skeptic.

The Weblog addiction begins innocently enough: Maybe you start by regularly checking your sister's blog to see the latest photos of your new nephew; or maybe you want to see what your kid's up to during his year as a foreign exchange student. Or you're tracking a political issue of particular interest, and one site leads you to another. Pretty soon you've got a list of 50 or 60 sites you want to keep tabs on, and checking all of them eats up quite a bit of time. This is where RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can help.

When a blog, or any other Web site, publishes a news feed in a format such as RSS, you can use an application to monitor when it has updated content. (There are a few other formats than RSS, but they do pretty much the same thing.) As well as saving you from visiting individual sites to check for new content, viewing a feed cuts out a lot of clutter--usually you don't see ads in RSS readers--and lets you skim quickly through the headlines and summaries for individual stories or blog posts.

But unlike a Web page, an RSS feed isn't point-and-click: You can't view it directly in the browser and have it make sense; you need to use a type of software called an RSS reader. For example, see how ugly PC World's Latest News feed looks when you don't view it through a reader.

One of the simplest-to-use RSS readers is the Web-based Bloglines. It has lots of advantages, the main one being that it's Web-based. You don't have to learn a new interface, or wrap your brain around the concept of using another application to view Web content.

I've been a Bloglines junkie for about a year now: I've set it as my browser home page, and I check it way too often. But it's often slow, perhaps because it's successful and gets a lot of traffic. More annoying, it often shows me items that I've already seen, even though they haven't been changed. The interface also leaves something to be desired: Though clean, it's dull, and the pane where you manage your subscriptions isn't terribly intuitive. So I decided to see whether the Mac offers better ways to get my daily blog fix.

I tried out five RSS readers, including NewsMac, NetNewsWire, NewsFire, PulpFiction, and Shrook.

I also experimented with the RSS capabilities built into the Firefox and OmniWeb browsers. Safari currently doesn't have RSS-reading capabilities built in, but its next major upgrade, which will be delivered with OS X 10.4 (Tiger), will have an integrated RSS reader. Based on the glimpses Apple has provided, Safari's promised tools for managing and viewing RSS feeds look quite extensive--and rumor has it that the release of Tiger is imminent. Stay tuned for updates.

The In-Browser Options

Firefox automatically discovers feeds and indicates when they are available for a Web page you're visiting. A little orange icon appears in the status bar at the bottom of the screen--but when you click that icon, you only get the option to save the feed as a bookmark. You don't get any management tools; feeds don't disappear from the list once you view the pages; and you see headlines only. The "Open in Tabs" option underneath the list of headlines opens every item as a tabbed Web page; you can't select just a couple.

Firefox doesn't give you much control over your RSS feeds; they're essentially bookmarks.

Firefox gives you a quick and easy way to check for updates to a site, but it doesn't give you nearly as much control--or quick-hit information--as Bloglines or a dedicated reader. If you want to experiment, there are various extensions available to extend Firefox's RSS capabilities, but I didn't find any that I liked.

OmniWeb lets you subscribe the same way Firefox does, by automatically searching for feeds and showing an icon at the bottom of the screen. Click the icon, and you can bookmark the feed. OmniWeb goes Firefox one better, though, by showing which items in a feed you've already read. For a quick cheat, open up OmniWeb's Bookmarks page and select Unviewed Content as one of your collections. Then you can scroll through individual news items from feeds you've subscribed to, and see the item's summary. And the OmniWeb icon in the dock shows the number of new items you have, like the dedicated RSS readers do.

The Winning RSS Reader

Of all the RSS-reading options I looked at, the one with the cleanest interface and the most features was NetNewsWire, from Ranchero Software. I looked at a beta of version 2.0. The beta I tried is priced at $25, though there is a free version with fewer features.

Though NetNewsWire's interface looks more like that of an e-mail application than a Web browser, it's easy to get used to its look and start browsing through feeds and news items. There are already a number of subscriptions set up when you first open the program; you can start experimenting right away, even if you don't already have feeds you want to subscribe to. In addition, the Sites Drawer, which you can pop out by clicking the button in the tool bar, lists tons more feeds that you can subscribe to with one click. If that's not enough, under the Help menu, there's a Find More Feeds command that lets you open any of several Web sites with RSS feeds.

But if you've bothered to download an RSS reader, it's likely that you already know of some Web sites whose feeds you want to see. And most often, you know the Web site's URL, which isn't the same as the URL for its feed. NetNewsWire makes subscribing in this kind of situation fairly hassle-free. It usually can autodiscover the feed URL, so you don't have to search for it. In addition, if you use Safari, you can subscribe to feeds from within the browser (but it's not exactly intuitive to do so).

If, like me, you have a lot of subscriptions in Bloglines, you can set NetNewsWire 2.0 to monitor these as well. It's convenient not to have to resubscribe, but because NetNewsWire is pulling these from Bloglines, you don't benefit from NetNewsWire's greater speed. Unfortunately, NetNewsWire lacks one customizing tool that Bloglines has: Bloglines allows you to choose how much of an item you see (summary or full text); there's no comparable option in NetNewsWire.

Customizable Interface

NetNewsWire lets you group feeds into folders, which helps keep things organized if you have lots of subscriptions. Version 2.0 lets you create smart lists, which work like Apple ITunes' smart playlists: You set criteria that filter your feeds.

NetNewsWire has a very readable integrated browser; new pages open on their own tabs.

When you want to open an item and look at the Web page it originated from (which I often do because the short summary isn't enough), you can set NetNewsWire to open your default browser or to open its own browser window. Of all the readers I tried, NetNewsWire had the most usable integrated browser.

The wide-screen view places NetNewsWire's three panes horizontally across the screen.

The look of NetNewsWire is also very customizable. I like its wide-screen view the best, which places the feed, title, and summary in panes from left to right across the screen. If you don't like the pale blue and white color scheme, you can change it, as well as the type faces and sizes for all elements. You can also change which commands appear in the toolbar at the top.

We're all used to getting our Web browser for free, which makes the idea of paying for an RSS reader unattractive. But if time is money, NetNewsWire is easily worth its price. If you use Web research in your job, the time savings over using a browser makes this purchase a bargain.

Ranchero publishes a complementary program called Mars Edit, for composing blog posts offline. Within NetNewsWire 2.0, you can call up Mars Edit and quickly copy a news item for posting to your own blog. This is just one of several Mac blogging tools out there--and once you've begun visiting other blogs regularly and have seen how people use them, you're likely to want to create one yourself. I'll look at Mac-centric blog authoring tools in a future column.