Journal

RSS is essentially my killer app for the internet, and definitely for my smartphone, and it's driving me crazy that the trend is away from RSS and towards making everyone download individual apps. The New York Times and the Economist are guilty of making their RSS feeds hard to find.

There are dozens and dozens of Android RSS readers out there, but by coincidence I settled on the same one as you and mostly like it. I hoped for a reader with cloud sync so that from one Android device to the next the app would remember which articles I'd marked as 'read' but no love. The closest I got was running an instance of ttrss on my own server and using not the official Android app but a 3rd party one. That was a lot of work and I didn't much like the interface, so I dropped it and am back to RssDemon again.

On the desktop side, huge thumbs up for the console based reader 'newsbeuter' and either rawdog or CURN. They're all somewhat obscure, but you can run newsbeuter on a shell account and then access it from work over SSH or something, and it's a lean, mean feed reader. Rawdog creates an HTML page you can use on your own site (I put one up for my own use here: http://therandymon.com/rawdogger.html via a cron script that runs every morning). CURN is a java app, which turns people off, but it's highly configurable and you can use it to create and mail to yourself an HTML email of your feeds, and do other things as well. All these solutions are better, in my opinion, than just being forced to download an app for every news source.

Then, you're only inches away from podcast technology too - highly recommend doggcatcher on Android for managing podcasts.