A long time ago, there was a TV network called Tech TV. It had cool shows about technology type stuff. It was probably my favorite television network ever.
Then it got bought out by G4, the gaming network. Now owned by G4, all the tech shows started getting replaced by gamer oriented shows. All the great tech show hosts got laid off in favor of hip, stylish gamer hosts. Lame.
Kevin Rose, one of the younger, hipper tech show hosts got sick of the G4 and, with the help of his partner in crime, Dan Huard, started his own Internet TV station thing (http://www.revision3.com/). They have all kinds of awesome tech related shows, just like they had on Tech TV, except I dont' have to get extended cable to watch them.
I hadn't kept up with any of these shows since The Broken went on hiatus. Today, I decided to look it up and realized that I don't have the time to watch all the back episodes like I wanted. I figured instead of trying to watch all the ones that were already up, I'd do better to just watch the new ones as they come out. To do this, I would need a feed and a reader.
RSS feeds make it easy to keep up to date on news and site updates. I've got one for this blog (the orange icon in the menu bar). Revision3 has one for each of its shows. In order to take advantage of an RSS feed, however, you really need a feed Reader to aggregate all your feeds and keep you updated on them.
Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/), the email client that I use, has a built in News reader, so I figured I would just use that one. I went in and subscribed to all the feeds and everything looked peachy. Thunderbird, unfortunately, was built to be an email client first and foremost. It's news reading capabilities are kind of iffy. I'm all a fan of simple, but there comes a point when something just doesn't do what I need it to do. Thunderbird did not do what I needed it to do.
The main problem was that after subscribing to all of the feeds for all of the Revision3 shows, I found that there were almost 300 new articles in all those subscriptions. Not that bad, I thought, because I had just subscribed to them. They were all new to me. What I didn't know was that Thunderbird would pull down ALL the articles EVERY time it updated. So, after clicking the Get Mail button two or three time, I ended up with something like 800 new articles, most of which were duplicates. This would not do.
A quick Googling led me to Sharp Reader (http://www.sharpreader.net/). I've only used it for about an hour, but already I like it. It's everything I wanted. Simple, only pulls down updates and opens articles in an external browser. What more could I want? Perhaps more awesome news feeds to read in my new news reader? Probably.
While Thunderbird is a great email client, I would not suggest it as a news reader. Sharp Reader, however, I would throughly recommend for a News Reader. If you do a lot of newsing, I mean.
Until next time,
~~Ben
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