Program /n./ A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages.

Finding An Atom 1.0 Feed Reader

Sunday 18th September 2005 - Saturday 24th September 2005

Categories: Internet, Opinion, FLOSS

Linux News Readers

So... where better to start than in Debian's repository. A quick bit of internet searching, and I find AtomEnabled.org. On the website is a list of news readers that claim to be able to read Atom feeds. A quick look reveals three that I can install easily - Liferea, aKregator and Straw. After reading that last entry, I was slightly dubious about the validity of the list, but I was willing to try other readers.

Both Straw and Liferea are designed for Gnome, so I tried those first. After some more fiddling around with Straw (which essentially involved me refreshing the list and trying the Atom feed from XML.com), I gave up. It wouldn't even work out the name of the feed.

Next up was Liferea. My hopes weren't too high when I started it up to find an almost identical look to Straw. Still, looks can be deceiving, so I carried on. So I added the feed and... success! It appeared! So, a happy ending to my little story? Not quite. Yes, it read the basic parts of the feed, but it decided that every date was in 1970, which was slightly off from what I was hoping for. On the XML.com feed, the pictures wouldn't display, while they appeared on the RSS feed. So, I was closer, but still not there yet.

Finally, we have aKregator, which is designed for KDE, meaning it took slightly longer to download due to the KDE libraries. It claims to be able to read Atom 1.0 feeds, but with this program I was back to the same situation as Straw. A different look, but the same blank stare.

At this point, seeing as I've forgotten to mention it (and also seem bizzarely incapable of scrolling up the page and editing what I've already written), if you do know of an Atom 1.0 reader, please let me know, and put me out of my misery!

Now, we're at the end of the article so far, but I'm not quite sure how to finish it. It won't be the end permanently, so I can't just wrap things up, but I don't know what's coming next. Probably best just to leave it like this then.