Best RSS Feed Reader for Windows – Newspaper Style & Offline Mode

There are multiple ways to subscribe to a Blog’s feed and some of the most used ways to Read Feeds are Email Subscriptions, Firefox Live Feeds & using different Feed Reader software’s. In this article am going to show you a software which is one of my favorite and also which is recommended to most geeks & techies who look for instant access to different feeds and stay updated.

The software is called as FeedDemon which can be downloaded for free and installed quickly. Once the software is installed on your computer, initially you will be asked with a excellent option of ‘Google Reader Synchronization’ under which you can use this software as well as ‘Google Reader’ when you need access to your subscribed feeds on another computer. If you enable this option you will have to enter your Google Logins.

Once you enter your Gmail Logins and check the option of ‘Remember my Login’ the logins would be authenticated and following this, the software will retrieve all the subscriptions you have subscribed to through the Google Reader. This can take a few seconds to a few minutes based on the total number of feeds you have subscribed to. In my case i have subscribed to around 50 feeds. Once its done, you will get a message which says – FeedDemon is now synchronized with Google Reader.

Next FeedDemon would give you a option to subscribe to a few default feeds or else. If you are already having feeds under Google Reader, its recommended to select the second option of – No, don’t subscribe me to anything else right now.

Following this, FeedDemon would load in the full mode, and start synchronizing subscriptions & items on the Interface which is divided into two sections. The left smaller section has a list of all the feeds you have subscribed to under different Categories / Tags and the right Interface would have the Feed Items listed in a newspaper mode.

In order to start using this software, you need to click on the button which is available on the Top – Next Unread. This would show you all the subscriptions of each feed in a newspaper looking format, mostly without any advertisements and perfectly optimized for reading and also printing. The feed items are shown as a Excerpt, which can be read as a full story when you click on the ‘More’ link, though the feed owner should have activated full feed reading option. Also next to the excerpt of the article you will find a small thumbnail which is again the First Image of the feed item, giving you a idea on what the post is referring to. Once you have read the items listed, you need to again click on the button – Next Unread, so that feedDemon would show you the next items.

In order to Update the software with all the recently updated items, you need to go to Tools > Update All [Shift + Ctrl + F5] option which would again synchronize all the read items and update the feeds with new items. If you have not read the feeds from a few days and feel like the whole stuff is packed with thousands of items which cannot be read you need to visit the ‘CleanUp Wizard’ option which is listed under the tools. This would cleanup everything from FeedDemon including items older than 60days and many other options.

You can also go for a Selective Cleanup by just removing all the items which are older than 24 Hours time frame, and saving up all the latest items which you can read. This is available under the ‘Hit the Panic Button’ option under the Tools menu. It will be giving you a total number of items for a certain time frame which you can change from 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 5 days and all items. The Panic Button option also shows up when you have more than 1000 items to read in the reader and which is a number which cannot be easily read, hence you can remove all the old items.

You can also click on File > Work Offline option which would ‘prefetch unread items before going offline’. This is a useful option because the software would update all the subscriptions and then download the items which can be read even when there is no Internet Access available to your Laptop. The synchronization option would again update the Google Reader with the items which are read and unread, hence you can also read the unread items on other devices like mobile phones, ebook readers through the browser version of Google Reader.