Finally, an offline RSS-reader that doesn’t make me want to beat people…

Ok, I admit it – I used to be a feed junkie. That all stopped when Torsten was born, though, mainly because I was reading my feeds through LiveJournal, and the River of News style I prefer basically sucks if you’re reading it online IMHO (personal preference, I’m sure). Posts tend to disappear and you just miss out. Of course, for me, part of the point of River of News is that it’s OK to miss out, like reading the newspaper, but I do like to be able to go back to point X and read forward at my leisure. On the other hand, I really hate aggregators which group by blog, because really, if I wanted to read them by blog, I’d just have a list of links and click on them all.

It’s just the way I organize my brain. (My husband and every former roommate I’ve ever had are all now choking at my use of the verb organize with I as its subject and no negation in the sentence. Bite me, suckas!) I like the chronological approach, and that’s just how it is.

So what I wanted was something that would 1) download from feeds, and 2) organize them like an LJ Friends list. I wanted control over how far back the posts would go, and I wanted it to run on Linux.

I’ve tried all sorts of aggregators under various OSs, and they were all either annoying to install under Linux or just didn’t do what I want (and didn’t allow me enough room to tinker) or had craploads of features that I was uninterested in while still not having the ones I wanted.

But today… today, I got what I wanted. Behold rawdog. Written in Python, easy to configure yet providing me with as much room to mess around as I want, and writes an offline RoN html page (or pages with the paged-output plugin) for me to read at my leisure when I’m offline. No screwing around with GUIs that crash, no messing around with crap I don’t care about, and no being forced to use “features” I have no need for.

Beautiful

(I am spartan when it comes to software – your mileage may vary.)