Scoop’s Views

I just between several computers, and in doing so, sometimes things aren’t always identical. Although I do carry at least one USB memory stick with files I’ve backed up — or, more accurately, synchronized — not everything I touch or do gets backed up to the keyfob memory. If I did that, I’d need at least a 20gig memory stick, not a 2gig stick.

One thing I like to keep the same on any machine I work on, whether it is a machine with Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows 2000, Windows XP Pro, or Windows Vista Ultimate, are my RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve played with several different RSS tools, but there’s one that I’ve relied on for consistently great performance, but also one that’s well-maintained.

Keeping my RSS feeds up-to-date is important. I keep tabs on general news items, on specific news items, and on specific interests in various areas, not always in the news. I also have my favorite RSS feeds from blogs, Web sites, and other outlets to keep me abreast of current events, such as a new podcast has been uploaded on one of the sites I visit.

Many people swear by one browser for all their surfing needs. In this day and age of Internet browsing and development, using one browser for all your needs isn’t only akin to keeping your head buried in the sand, it can be downright bad for you if you are doing serious research on a variety of topics.

I’ve been to some sites that work only in Internet Explorer. I’ve been to other sites where the page’s author (not always the site owner) has purposely added coding so specific features did not display in Internet Explorer, but would only display in Firefox. That is worse than being childish, as some people, such as my ex-wife, would never install anything — including a program from CD — onto a computer for fear of “installing it wrong.”

Even without people purposely keeping content from others not using the site owner’s browser-of-choice, there are always issues where particular browsers cannot display specific coding. This has been true since the release of the first browsers after Mosaic made the Internet a graphical environment and this will likely be the case as long as more than one computing platform exists, as well as developers coding browsers.

All that said, there’s one simple tool I like to use — on any platform — and that is Wizz RSS Feedreader for Firefox. Yes, it’s browser specific, which was hard for me to choke down and deal with when I first began using it in its early days — a couple or few years ago?? — but now, though, it’s the first thing I check when I fire up the computer.

What does the Wizz RSS feedreader do that others don’t do? Well, for one thing, the developer is constantly making tweaks to it, which lets me know it hasn’t been abandoned. It does everything I would expect it to do for a browser-based feedreader, including forward items to others. Wizz is a easy-to-use tool that makes keeping up with all my RSS feeds in a browser a snap.

There are a few things Wizz can do that other RSS feedreaders don’t do, even on a good day, such as:

• allowing you to create a server account to save (and later, if needed, restore) your feeds
• restore your feeds from the server account
• import and export an OPML file simply and easily

As stupid as it sounds, I’ve actually tried — and quickly deleted — a few feedreaders that didn’t allow for the import or export of OPML files. Well, perhaps there was a way, but there was no intuitive way, and the non-existent or bare-bones Help file (one actually had the following as the entire contents of its Help file: “If you use this product, send me $100 today!”)

There are things Wizz doesn’t do — or at least not that I’ve ever tried (because I didn’t see an intuitive way, but I didn’t check, either). They are:

• it doesn’t download attachments (mp3, mp4, wav, html, pdf, etc.)
• it doesn’t do an automatic clean-up, say, after 100 items have been downloaded from any feed (”channel”)
• it lacks a simple way to backup all feed content to a local directory, which is a feature I would really love to see added. After a server problem earlier this year, where I lost the database containing my blog entries for about 16 months, having a copy of the posts, locally, would have helped me restore things locally. Because I used the blog software’s built-in editor, I never had a local copy. Well, that’s resolved, as I use only local blog editors (Windows Live Writer or BlogDesk)

As I said, Wizz is a great tool that I’ve been using for a number of years now. It’s solid, stable, and is far from being abandoned by its developer. In fact, if you drop the developer an email with comments or suggestions, you may just be surprised by how quickly you receive a reply.