RSS Bandit - Free desktop RSS reader

Posted on May 24, 2008 at 5:08 am

Looking for an excellent tool to read all your RSS feeds? If you don’t have an idea on what RSS is, you should check out the excellent RSS introduction video here. To simply put it, RSS is a technology that allows you to aggregate content from all of your favorite websites (called RSS feeds) and read it from a single location.

The tool that you use to read those RSS feeds is called a RSS reader. There are two types of RSS readers; web-based and desktop-based. If you prefer to have your RSS feeds delivered to your desktop, try RSS Bandit - a free, desktop-based RSS reader for Windows.

There are many advantages of using a desktop-based RSS reader like RSS Bandit over a web based RSS reader. One of them is that you can download all your feed items and read them offline, when there is no Internet connection available. With a simple, easy to use paned-interface, RSS Bandit is one of the easiest RSS reader that you can use.

RSS Bandit Features

Support for multiple RSS feed formats, including password protected feeds.
Tabbed support for a more organized view of feed items.
Special Feed categories allow you to manage all your feed items from different categories much easier.

Top Stories instructs RSS Bandit to determine the best contents based on your feed items.
Custom Formatter allows you to have different style sheet views for each of your feed subscription.

custom-formatter-for-specific-feeds

Newsgroups support - you can even use RSS feed to subscribe and post to newsgroups too.
Synchronization support with NewsGator - a free, web based feed reader. You can sync feed items on both platforms to get all the latest and updated contents.
Sync feeds with other RSS Bandit desktop clients with WebDAV, FTP or file share. Pretty useful if you use RSS Bandit on multiple computers.
Ability to remove old feed items based on a time frame - e.g. remove items older than 1 month. Useful to prune old contents from a huge feed list.

define-prune-time-for-feeds

Subscribe to a feed easily with a single click or drag and drop feed links to RSS Bandit’s interface.
Able to view and post comments from within the interface for blogs / websites based on dasBlog or .TEXT.
Speedier downloads of feed items by using technologies such as GZIP encoding and HTTP Conditional GET function.
Integrated Google, Feedster, MSN and Yahoo! Search toolbar.
Flag and watch interesting feed items easily for future reference.
Automatic updating of feed location support via HTTP 301 (Move Permanently) error code.
Proxy server support if you are inside an internal network.
Multiple languages support.

Overall, RSS Bandit is one of the easiest, free RSS reader that I’ve used on my desktop. If you haven’t embrace the RSS technology yet, get started today with RSS Bandit. It might save you a lot of Internet browsing time!

This is a guest post by Syahid A. from TechMalaya

Tags: rss reader, free rss reader, desktop rss reader, free desktop rss reader

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2 Responses to “RSS Bandit - Free desktop RSS reader”

Venu said on : May 25th, 2008 at 11:52 am

I too was using RSS Bandit some time back, however after FeedDemon became free, I ditched Bandit !

FeedDemon has almost all the feature of Bandit and its much faster than Bandit.

Yogesh Amberkar said on : June 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 am

Even i use FeedDemon, its superb. Dont know about RSS bandit.

Also, there are many Desktop RSS feed readers and selecting 1 according to your needs is a big task. This leads to the comparison of these feed readers.

I found a detailed comparison, including Pros & Cons, of some of the best Desktop/Online RSS feed readers here - Comparison of Best Desktop RSS Feed Readers
&
Comparison of Best Online RSS Feed Readers