RSS Bandit

I had a hard drive go out on me a little while back and am in the process of re-installing all the software on my machine to rebuild it. While it's a huge pain in the ass, I actually like being albe to completely start over a little. I just prefer to do this on my own time line instead of when the computer decides I should. I had been using Sharp Reader for my RSS reader, but am giving RSS Bandit a spin. It's an open source project that's hosted on Source Forge. You probably know I'm a big fan of Open Source software but that's less important to me than ensuring that the software I use is the best at the particular task I'm asking it to complete. I haven't been with RSS Bandit long, but there is one qucik thing that I like about it over Sharp Reader. In Sharp Reader, whenever a new article is picked up an annoying little message window pops up over the windows taks bar. There is no way to turn this off. Sometimes I like this, but there are times when I want the it off. For example, when giving a presentation from my laptop, I prefer not to have a message pop up saying a new story with the title "Increasing number of female college students forced to resort to prostitution to pay for college" has come up on fark.com. RSS Bandit lets you drop different feeds into categories that show up as folders. One knock against it is that each time you open the application, the folders are collapsed and you have to open them individually to see the specific feeds inside each. This is not good. It should remember the state of each folder and launch that way next time. My solution for this right now is simply to keep everything at the "root" level of the RSS feeds outside of any folders. Less organized, but it's the only way to see everything without having to open a bunch of folders. Anyway, it seems pretty good so far.