What is RSS, where to download icons and which reader is the best. Review of RSS readers: choosing the best RSS reader

I present to your attention two wonderful programs for reading RSS feeds. What these programs have in common is that they are portable, you can install them on a flash drive and they will always be with you.

But first of all, you need to understand why these programs are needed in general, if you understand this, then that’s great! If you understand, but not completely, then I recommend reading the article.

NFReader

The RSS aggregator NFReader doesn't have a lot of settings, but that's what makes it remarkable. It is worth noting the following advantages of this program:

1) Simplicity. This is the most important advantage over others similar programs. Even an inexperienced user can understand the settings of this program.

2) It is small in size and does not require installation.

3) Supports export and import of channels using files in OPML format. You can export a single article to an html file.

5) Quite a fast program, not demanding on system resources.

6) Fully Russified.

Among the shortcomings, I would note the following:

1) There is no built-in browser.

2) Does not support attachments.

Although this can be considered a disadvantage, conditionally, since not everyone requires these functions.

GreatNews

The GreatNews RSS aggregator will appeal to those who like great functionality and a large number of settings.

Advantages of this program great amount, here are some of them:

1) There is a built-in browser that allows you to open links in new tabs.

2) You can synchronize with the Bloglines service.

3) Export and import channels using files in OPML and XML format.

4) There is an interesting option called Blog This, which allows you to post to a blog.

5) There is a Track Comments function with which you can read Comments on an article.

Of the minuses it is worth noting:

1) Not completely Russified.

2) For an inexperienced user It will be difficult to understand the settings.

P.S. Russian language is selected in the settings:

Viev\Language\Russian

After the first launch of the program, you will have to spend a couple of minutes deleting pre-installed RSS feeds (take a look, maybe something will come in handy 8)).

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. This article will focus on the question - what is RSS and why is it used? mandatory should be used on your Internet resource. In general, this abbreviation means Really Simple Syndication, which translates to “Very simple acquisition of information.” The designation Feed is also very often used ( feed).

The essence of this name comes down to the fact that you are given the opportunity, in a form convenient for you, to follow the appearance of news on dozens and even hundreds of sites, blogs and forums. To say in one word what RSS is is not so simple, despite its apparent simplicity, and, accordingly, there will be a series of posts about everything related to this format.

In this section I plan to talk about what it is, how to activate it and configure it on a particular engine, how to set up its broadcast through, and then add it to various aggregators and catalogs, as well as how and the best way to read news feeds.

If you answer the question of what RSS is from the point of view of a webmaster (the owner of a web project), then we can say that this thing helps a lot in attracting additional visitors. By adding beautiful and eye-catching icons or a subscription button to your resource, you will encourage visitors to click on it, thereby acquiring an audience of regular readers.

What is RSS and why you should add an email subscription

We will talk specifically about what it physically is at the end of this article, but now I want to touch first of all on the question - what does a subscription to the site’s news flow provide and what opportunities does it provide for both users and owners of web projects.

In other words, why will you definitely need to put a subscription icon or button on your resource immediately after its creation, and why will it be convenient for users to subscribe to RSS feeds and view them in their readers?

It’s all about the convenience and timeliness of receiving information about the release of new materials on Internet projects of interest to users. Once you subscribe to the sites you are interested in, you will no longer need to go to them in order to see if anything new has appeared there.

As soon as a new article or commentary on an article that is important to you appears on a web project that interests you, you will immediately find out about it (through your favorite reader), if, of course, you have subscribed to the news flow of these resources in advance. Comfortable? Undoubtedly!

But, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, subscription and reading news in readers has not yet become as common and common an activity as reading Email(only every tenth user reads news streams in a specialized reader). People are quite inert and are not very eager to study and understand something new. This is exactly what happens with RSS readers.

Take a closer look, you will almost always find something like this on blogs. "RSS to E-mail" or the like (for example, at the top of the page on the right is the inscription “Receive updates by E-mail”, and at the bottom of each post there is a corresponding form for entering E-mail.

This is implemented, as a rule, in one of two ways: either through the above-mentioned “RSS to E-mail” service, or through online service FeedBurner (I provided a link to the manual just above). These are, of course, half measures, because... When reading by E-mail, you are deprived of the lion's share of the conveniences that a specialized reader provides you.

But it’s better than nothing at all. For example, out of 7,000 users subscribed to the site’s news flow, more than half receive newsletters by E-mail, and do not use any reader for this.

Icons and buttons, as well as protection from RSS Grabber

Now let's see what the news flow looks like. To do this, you don’t need to have an e-reader at hand; you just need to find the corresponding icon or button on the page of the resource that interests you. As a rule, webmasters try to make this icon noticeable and catchy (a typical color for it is orange).

If you want to find and download a button to subscribe to the RSS of your site, you can use any resource; there are plenty of them on the Internet.

It is very important that your button is large enough big size, had a catchy, but at the same time not repulsive appearance. It should be placed somewhere at the top of your resource(on the first screen). On blogs, it can most often be seen at the top of the right column (sidebar).

This is where your visitors will look for this button when they want to subscribe to your new materials. Therefore, you probably shouldn’t be original - place a catchy and preferably original icon in its usual place, so as not to complicate the life of visitors.

Free-rss-icon-list

By the way, on various internet In projects you may come across the so-called Feedburner counter(it shows the number of currently subscribed visitors), by clicking on which you can read and, if desired, subscribe to the news feed.

My feed got this look thanks to the broadcast RSS feeds through Feedburner, which provides a lot of tools for customizing its appearance and not only its appearance (look for the link to the manual at the beginning of the article). But more on that later.

Now I want to focus on one key point, which each owner of a resource with an active feed decides in his own way. The question is: how to protect yourself from Grabber, which extract the texts of your feeds and publish them on slogs (a blog automatically filled with content stolen from feeds) and other GS (go... sites).

In principle, an option that can help here is not to publish in the feed full text articles, but only the beginning, so that the reader can read the ending on your resource. As you can already see, the blog feed site is just a cropped version (I don’t want to give thieves easy way use my content).

However, I am not an ardent supporter of this method of distributing RSS feeds and it is possible that I will soon publish the full text of articles in order to create convenience for reader users.

In support of the trimmed version of the news stream, one more argument can be made, in addition to protection from Grabber: after reading the beginning of the article and becoming interested in it, the user will click on the link and continue reading on your web project, which will increase its traffic and, possibly, increase earnings on contextual advertising(work with YAN through Profit Partner is described).

Among the negative aspects, the following can be cited: the user does not have access to the Internet at the time of reading the article (and sometimes simply does not want to go to your resource when there is still a lot of unread news from other websites in the reader) or simply the habit of reading news exclusively in reader. Which forming method to choose is up to you.

Perhaps it’s also worth talking about what the RSS format represents in its essence. It is a standardized data format of the XML family, like html. But it is distinguished by strict restrictive rules, and therefore it is very convenient to disassemble it into automatic mode.

Moreover, this format has the main goal of transmitting content, and this leads to cutting off all sorts of excesses, such as: design, various scripts, styles used. In fact it's crystal clear content- a dream for owners of a slow or paid per megabytes downloaded Internet connection (.

How does it work? Simple enough. The content of your feed is entered into the database, and the reader of the user subscribed to your newsletter goes to this address and downloads all the contents of the feed. Subsequently, the reader begins to periodically, depending on how the user configures it, contact the same address for updates.

If updates are found, the reader will immediately let the user know about this with a pop-up window or in some other way (it all depends on the specific reader).

So, to summarize: RSS is a very convenient thing that will help save us time and traffic, and will also allow us to always be aware of the news we are following. This is from the reader's point of view.

From the site owner's point of view - This is an invaluable tool, without which full development and advancement is impossible. Here is the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of the article - why do you need to fence off this entire garden?

Using this technology and format is very easy, you just have to try it. About the use of RSS in practice, about possible settings for various engines, about setting up feed broadcasting through Feedburner, about which aggregators you should add your feed to, and about which readers are best to get acquainted with feeds, I will tell you in this section.

RSS readers (readers)

Readers are distinguished by an enviable diversity. There are programs that you will need to install on your operating system. Some browsers, for example Opera, also allow you to read news feeds. But there is also a whole galaxy of readers that you can use online without installing anything on your computer.

Compared to software readers, online readers have a couple of advantages - they do not need to be installed and can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, and such readers can constantly automatically aggregate news from all sites to which you are subscribed (as a result, you simply go under use your login to such a reader and see everything new that has appeared since your last login).

Let me give you a list of online readers that you can use for your needs:

Yandex Tape is one of the most popular readers in RuNet. Exists special button from Yandex, so that your visitors can subscribe to your RSS feed directly through Yandex Feed (there is a description of it).
Google Reader- an almost ideal reader, which, unfortunately, has already closed. The entire world community is deeply saddened by this.
Netvibes - has a huge number of settings and rich functionality.

There are a lot of programs for reading feeds and your choice will not be so simple. I myself do not use such programs, so I cannot recommend anything specific. Sorry.

Good luck to you! Before see you soon on the pages of the blog site

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RSS reader built into browsers

Today, readers are built into almost all popular browsers:

FireFox;
Opera;

Their main advantage is simplicity. Subscribing to news is similar to adding a site to your favorites. The disadvantages are the limited functionality and the fact that you will have to configure everything again on another computer.

Firefox

Adding an RSS feed to Firefox is incredibly simple, just go to the site whose updates you want to receive, and in the panel FireFox menu Click “Bookmarks” - “Subscribe to news feed”.

You will be redirected to the page with announcements of this site, click on “Subscribe”, choose where to place your subscription bookmark and click “Subscribe” again.

Now you can follow updates to this site from the firefox bookmarks bar.

RSS reader in Opera

Click on the “Opera” icon on the left top corner- select “Feeds” - if we want to add a new feed, then select “Manage news feeds...”, if you are reading what you have already subscribed to, then “Read news feeds”.

By selecting “Manage news feeds...”, the News Feed Subscriptions window will open, where you should click “Add” and specify the properties.

There are only three properties:

Name - you can set it yourself or simply check the box “Get name from feed”, then it will be set automatically;
Address — RSS feed address. How to recognize him? Each blog has an orange icon like the one I have in the right column. It may look different and is often disguised as something, but you won't have any trouble finding it. By clicking on it, you will be taken to a page - its URL is what we need.
Refresh—specifies the intervals at which RSS reader will request updates from the sites you have subscribed to.

Having specified all the parameters, all that remains is to click on “Ok”. Read news in the “Opera” section - “Feeds” - “Read news feeds”. We've sorted out Opera, now IE is next.

Things are a little more confusing with Internet Explorer, but nothing, they didn’t cope with that. Let's look at Internet example Explorer 9 version.

On the page of the site that we want to see in our news feed, go to “Service” in the menu bar - select “Web feed detection” - select RSS 2.0 subscription; it may be called differently on different sites.

Note: If you do not have the menu bar enabled, press Alt.

You will be redirected to the subscription page, where you click on “Subscribe to this web channel.” In the window that appears, specify the name of the new RSS feed and in which folder it will be saved.

To view updates from added sites, click on the star in the upper right corner and select the Feeds tab.

Online RSS readers

Advantages of such readers:

mail, reader, maps, search engine, calendar and a bunch of other useful widgets are in one place;
no need to configure for each computer;
RSS reader exists regardless of your operating system and the computer in general. If your OS crashed, your computer burned out, or you just formatted HDD, no data will be lost.
You can access your reader from your phone, your friends’ computer, or from an Internet cafe; all you need is a browser and the Internet, and you don’t need to configure anything additional.

What could be the disadvantages? The desire to have something with greater functionality.

The most popular are Google Reader and Yandex Tape. They are very simple and intuitive clear interface. I have already written about where to find them and how to add new announcements to them, so I will not repeat myself.

I would like to highlight one more service - Netvibes. I dedicated an entire article to him -. In addition to the RSS reader, it has a lot of interesting things.

RSS reader programs

The main advantage of such readers is big set functionality. The disadvantage is that they are located on the computer, that is, if you have several computers (at work/at home), then you will have to install it on each of them. Fortunately, you won’t have to set everything up again, because... It is possible to export/import news feeds. It is not possible to view your news feed from someone else's computer.

OS: Windows.
Interface language: Russian.

Free, multifunctional RSS reader with Russian interface. It is possible to export/import customized news feeds; file formats are supported: OPML, OCS or XML. In order to view the pages of the site, it is not necessary to open an additional browser; they can be opened in the program itself, which is very convenient.

You can add subscriptions in the following ways:

Adding an RSS feed for a specific site - just specify the address of this site, and RSS Bandit itself will detect the news feeds available on it.
Subscribe to the news group. To do this, you need to specify an NNTP news server.
Search news feeds according to a given word. Available by default search engines: Syndic8 service and Yahoo! News.

For convenience, added feeds can be grouped into folders.

To add a feed, select “New...” - “News subscription” from the menu and follow the assistant’s instructions for adding a new signature.

OS: Windows.
Interface language: Russian.

Simple, free and with a Russian interface. Provides the following functionality:

customizing the interface type - there are three templates to choose from;
grouping news by date, tag or source;
distribution of RSS feeds into folders;
flexible sorting of news feeds;
detailed information on each individual news: status, date, tag, source and author;
the built-in browser allows you to open website pages in the FeedReader3 program itself;
export/import of news feeds to an OPML file;
fine-tuning program behavior;
and much more.

To add new announcements, go to “File” - “Add” - “News Feed”, specify the address of the new RSS feed and click “apply”.

This concludes my RSS reader review! Thank you for your attention. See you again!