Early Beta RSS Feed Reader: Feednation

I like RSS feeds. And almost more than that I like RSS feeds by e-mail. So I want to check out Feednation, which is in "early beta" at http://www.feednation.com/ .

Feednation is free but of course requires registration. Registration needs a user name and password, and validation of the account by clicking a link. Once you confirm your registration you don't get a lot of guidance, just the word "Success".

You can start by clicking on Feeds on the menu. That gives you a list of your feeds. Of course you don't have any feeds yet but it's all good. I added half-a-dozen feeds. The feeds all appeared in a New Feeds group on the left, and the feeds themselves appeared on the right. Expanded feeds were in really large print (I will not complain about my old eyes with this site!) with icons to denote new feed entries.

You can create new groups for your feeds. (They're like folders.) Here's the cool thing though; there are several options for your folders. Options include Public or Private, how often you want to be e-mailed about new entries in the group's feeds (options are immediately, hourly, daily, or weekly. "Never" is also an option.) You can also choose to get the e-mails as HTML or plain text, or set the group as inactive so you don't receive e-mail notifications.

Hmm. A little thought, some feeds sent to my cell phone -- me LIKE.

You can also manage these options on a feed-by-feed basis. Go to Manage feeds and you'll get a list of your feeds with a series of toggles. The toggles allow you to see the feed online or via e-mail (or both), or whether it's active. You can also delete from here. Toggling a yes to a no refreshes the page and the toggle from green to ... blue (somehow I was expecting red.)

When you're done playing with the pages go over and look at the control panel. You can hook up Feednation to your del.icio.us account, set a username for public pages, or import from Bloglines. (OPML import and export are "coming soon".)

I like the settings here. I like the detail level for the feeds. I don't like the design, which is weird because normally I don't care at all about design. There's just something about it that's slightly off-putting. Despite that, it's one to visit and one to watch.

Posted to Internet-Technology-RSS | TrackBack