Newsgator is the company behind the popular RSS feed readers FeedDemon for Windows & NetNewsWire for Mac. With freeware being so popular these days, Newsgator was successful in selling paid versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire so far.

Now, they have announced these 2 excellent feed readers FREE for all to download and use. In fact, these 2 programs have just gotten some major feature enhancements.

Newsgator products come with sync facility with their internet-based servers. This means that your FeedDemon in your laptop and NetNewsWire in your iMac will be in sync all the time. Plus, the free web based version Newsgator Online will be in sync as well.

FeedDemon Quick Facts

• Newspaper format in neat tabs & News bins for future reference
• Synchronization with all RSS suite products
• Find what’s popular with other Newsgator users as well as who is linking to the news items you read
• Watch embedded video in the newspaper view
• Panic button - mark everything as read when you come back after a break
• Watches - Watch for keywords as they are downloaded
• Search outside of your subscriptions and create a dynamic channel with the results
• Download podcasts automatically and copy them to your iPod or other media player.
• iPhone support at http://m.newsgator.com

I used my portable GreatNews desktop reader for the longest time before getting addicted to the online Google Reader. And my main reason was that I missed having the ability to read feeds when I didn’t have my USB drive with me in a browser.

I have decided to give FeedDemon a whirl just like I give everything else a try. Importing my Google reader XMl file was painless. I haven’t tried their online counterpart yet but I doubt if it will come close to Google Reader, my current favorite RSS reader of choice. I might eat my own words after I try it, but you will know if I do.

What is your feed reader of choice? With the ability to have your desktop and online RSS reader in sync, would you give a desktop reader a chance?

Download FeedDemon 2.6 for Windows

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Blogging is fun and every blogger tries to reach out to newer audience and it is essential for a blog’s growth. Promoting your blog is the next important thing after publishing good content. If you write, readers will come isn’t true. You have to reach out to them to garner their attention. I am always on the lookout for fresh content and new blogs and I add close to 5 new blogs every week. Some of them stay in my feed reader and some of them vanish. I am sure there are many others who do the same.

With RSSHugger, now you can reach out to some of those readers looking for new blogs. You might end up increasing your RSS feed(?) subscription numbers a little bit this way.

How do I get listed?

You can get your blog listed by doing one of 2 things:

• Get your blog listed by paying $20. OR
• Post about RSSHugger in your blog and get listed for FREE

Why get listed?

RSSHugger has a Top 100 list of RSS feeds. If you can promote your blog to that list, eventually it will have a positive effect on your RSS subscriber numbers. What if you don’t get ranked this month, no worries the list is reset every month so you have a chance to get listed every month!

Even if you are not in the Top 100 right away, you are not totally invisible. There is a ‘Random Blog’ button that gives your blog feed a good chance of showing up. Your blog feed also shows up in the list of 100 new feeds.

At the time of writing this post, there is only 268 blogs listed and I say this is a great time to get listed.

How to Promote?

StumbleUpon is a powerful tool and Matthew has a great tip on promoting your RSS feed. Stumble your RSSHugger Feed page and it sure to convert a few stumblers into your readers. If you already have a RSSHugger page, leave your feed url at Matthews post to get some Stumble love.

I never say no to some Stumble love as well. You can visit ShanKri-la’s Feed Page here and help improve ShanKri-la’s ranking and give a little Stumbling.

Update : ShanKri-la has been approved at RSSHugger now!

Improving RSS subscribers is a very important task for any blog. How could I say no to an excellent way to reach out to a wider audience through RSSHugger?

Could you?

Update: 12-07-07

Thanks for everyone stumbling and visiting ShanKri-la’s RSSHugger Feed page.  I was thrilled to see us at the 9th position shooting past even JohnChow.  :grin: 

[via Blog About You Blog - Mark & Matthew]

As a voracious RSS feed consumer, I have always been irked by the fact that a lot of FeedBurner enabled blog feeds have the title URL point to a FeedBurner URL instead of a link to the actual post.

If I wanted to bookmark the post or save the link to blog about it, I cannot do it by simply right-clicking. I have to open the post in a new tab/window to get the actual post link. Or I could hunt the bottom of the post to see if the feed has a Permalink to the post.

Recently, I came across this tip in gHacks where you can turn off FeedBurner redirect and make your post title link directly to your post URL.

Here is how you do it:

• Login to your FeedBurner account
• Choose the feed you want to edit
• Under the Analyze tab, click on the ‘FeedBurner StatsPRO’ at the very bottom of the sidebar. (FeedBurner PRO was made free after Google acquired it)
• Uncheck ‘Item Link Clicks’ shown in the screenshot and save it.

After I made this change, all my feed titles now have direct link to my posts. I am going to lose the stats related to this. But right now, making it easy for my readers and fellow bloggers to use my posts is more important to me than those stats.

Also, a FeedBurner plugin such as Better Feed WordPress plugin provide a Permalink to your post and other powerful options to personalize the look of your feed. You have probably noticed how mine looks with this plugin enabled.

It is still quite natural to click the title of the post in the feed to get the link. I wouldn’t have found this if it weren’t for the gHacks post. So, hats off to them!

Does your blog feed has this FeedBurner redirect in post titles? Now, you too can make it easy for me to link to your posts.

Have you collected a lot of RSS feeds over time that you neatly categorized in folders? If you are like me, you hardly have time to visit some of these folders because to actually go through them all, you are going to need a few hours a day. And who are we kidding?

RSS is the best thing since sliced bread to me and many of you who follow our feed. But, it offers little flexibility in choosing what you want to read in a particular feed. Often you end up receiving any updates made in a blog/site and then manually discarding (marking Read) that item in your feed reader. Some blogs offer your category feeds, so you can choose the category you’d like to follow. But, often times it is not that clear cut.

For instance, what if you don’t want to receive any post of mine that talks about ‘Remember the Milk’ or if you wanted to only receive posts that are about ‘Firefox’? How would you like to fine tune a feed to match your interests and filter out other stuff that are probably interesting to others reaching your feed reader?

With FeedRinse, you can do just that. And more.. Let’s take a look at it’s features and I’ll show you how it can help you overcome your RSS Overload.

FeedRinse Quick Facts

• Add individual feeds or import an OPML file (most feed readers have an export option)
• You can get a rinsed individual feed or create a Channel RSS with multiple feeds in it. (limit of 5 channels)
  
• You can choose to allow or block a post in a feed by specifying one or more filters. Use a filter like iPhone to block any posts about iPhone or a filter like Facebook in a channel to get all the news about Facebook or even a combination of multiple keywords.
• You can set filters for individual feeds or set filters for Channels (group of feeds)
• Feed filtering includes keyword filtering, author filtering, isolating filter by title or body & profanity filtering.
• Filtering supports Regular Expressions for power users.
• You can easily add a page you are browsing to FeedRinse with a bookmarklet.
• Once, you have rinsed your feeds, you can get RSS feed url for individual feeds or Channels. You could also opt to export all your rinsed feeds as an OPML file that is readable by most Feed Readers.
• It’s FREE to sign-up & use.

I have previously discussed, as a blogger how you can use Google Alerts to stay on top of your niche. FeedRinse can help you in a similar manner where you can create customized channel feeds.

Here are a few ways you can use FeedRinse:

• You can also use author filtering to follow a single author in a multi-author blog.
• If you are following feeds from Craigslist/Slickdeals.net but you are looking for just one particular item, use FeedRinse to get just that item.
  
• If you are following a job feed and you want to filter the feed to your interest, you could do that.
• Follow a personal finance feed to follow just posts about Mutual Funds or create your own custom Finance channel.
• Follow just chicken recipes in a Culinary blog
• Follow windows recovery tools from a site like Softpedia

As you can see, the way you can use FeedRinse is limited only by your
imagination. Sure, you might miss out on a few interesting posts when
you are filtering but isn’t it much better than just letting it
accumulate and marking them all as read in frustration?

I have heard of FeedRinse before but haven’t had the need to try it so far. I set out to do something about my Google Reader feeds. I simply wasn’t able to read all my feeds everyday.

I had subscribed to a lot of feeds and some of the feeds were getting updated with tons of posts. For instance Mashable has anywhere between 30-50 posts a day and it was increasingly getting hard to read all the posts. I could have deleted their feed but some of their posts were of great interest to me. That’s where FeedRinse helped me out.

After setting this up this week, today was the first time I was able to actually really read and mark my feeds as ‘Read’. It did take me a week to achieve this and I will be fine tuning this by adding and deleting feeds to FeedRinse as I go.

This is my workflow to rinse my feeds

• Move a potential feed with clutter to FeedRinse to the proper channel
• Either choose to allow certain posts or block certain posts
• Come back and add more filters or remove filters until I get it just right

So, give your feed reader a fall cleaning and read your feeds with your own spam filter for the feeds. Are you ready to overcome your RSS Fed overload?

Geeks are Sexy $1300 Contest

Geeks are Sexy s having an awesome contest where they are giving away prizes worth $1300 celebrating their 2 year anniversary. And this is my entry for this contest and there is only a few more days left until the contest ends. So, write your how to article to enter the ccntest!

Just after rejoicing the magical 200+ RSS subscribers yesterday, you can see how selfless I am. I am going to actually show you how you can get email updates without subscribing to a RSS/Atom feed.

If you are one of those email junkies and prefer to get updates from a website via email, you are in luck. A lot of blogs already offer this facility for readers who prefer getting email updates. But, there are still a large number of websites out there that have RSS/Atom feeds available but do not offer a way to get email updates.

At ShanKri-la you have that option already in the sidebar where you can add your email address to receive daily updates via email. Click this link or scroll down in the sidebar to sign for updates via email.

RssFwd

RssFwd is a free web service that lets you specify a RSS feed and your email address to start receiving email updates.

Quick facts:

• You can visit RssFwd website to enter the RSS feed and your email address to start receiving email updates.
• Or you could drag their bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, and you can click on it anytime you are on a website you would like email updates and enter your email address.
• Or you could even import your OPML file to RssFwd and get email updates for that set of RSS/Atom feeds.
• When you subscribe, you can choose to receive text only emails or HTML emails (with images and formatting)
• You also get an option to choose between get updates as individual emails or get digests sent to you in the morning/afternoon/evening/night everyday. And the timezone it refers to is yours.
• If you are a GMail user, you can choose the Clustered option that’ll put updates from a day in one single thread. Very cool.
• You get an option to unsubscribe to a feed at any time right in your email as a link that you can click to unsubscribe.
• RssFwd offers blog authors a way to offer this service for their blog similar to the Feedburner service. You can display a button or a form in your blog to offer this to your readers.

Get Creative with RssFwd

If a website do not offer RSS updates, you can use a service like Page2RSS (Review) to create a feed url. Then use that RSS feed to have those updates to be sent to your email. Now, you have automated getting email updates from a website that provided no way to be notified of updates. If that doesn’t make your day, then I have to keep trying harder, eh?

TUAW shows how you can use RssFwd to receive updates from a website as SMS text messages in your mobile phone. Useful if your plan includes unlimited text message but limited data.

I just wanted to take the time to thank all my readers for supporting me and encouraging me since the beginning. I have had my doubts when I started blogging like who would read what I write.

With 200+ RSS subscribers today, I have found a few of you who do like what I write or at least found something useful to keep reading ShanKri-la. It has been a joy for the last 6 months and I have not run out of steam. In fact, I feel invigorated and hope to continue to provide useful information that you can take it with you and actually use it in your daily life. In spite of being a geek blog, this is where I hope to make a difference and stand out from the other tech blogs out there.

I am in the process of coming up with a fun contest soon. It will be simple to enter and hopefully fun to participate.

Again, I tip my hat to you for making this possible and I take immense pleasure in sharing this joyful milestone with you. Ciao.

These days, we can follow a lot of site updates through RSS feeds. Unfortunately, there is still a chunk of websites on the internet that don’t have RSS feeds enabled. If this is something important or crucial to your blogging needs, it might get tiring to keep visiting the site to check for updates.

Page2RSS

This simple web service aims at bridging this gap between the RSS savvy web readers like you and the archaic websites that haven’t put up RSS feeds yet. All you need to do is simply add the website you would like to follow to the box in Page2RSS page and you will get a link you can add to your feed reader. As simple as that.

Another way to use this service is to drag the ‘Add to Page2RSS’ link to your bookmarks toolbar. When you are on a website you would like to get RSS updates on, just click this link and you will be offered the RSS link as you did before.

That’s all there is to it. The elegance of it’s service is in its simplicity.

I am entering this blogging tip in ProBlogger’s Birthday Bash contest.