Liferea is a cool little aggregator that looks and works a lot like Feed Reader which I know a number of folks are totally in love with and really wish that it could be directly ported to a Linux environment. This is basically what you’re looking for although it’s not exactly stable yet. I grabbed the .deb from the downloads page and it did indeed install flawlessly but I used my own RDF feed to test it out. It crashed the first time that I pasted the entire URL into the “add feed” dialog and then simply didn’t work when I used the address minus the ‘http://’ tacked onto the beginning. Once I edited the entry and put back the beginning of the whole URL lifefrea took off like a scalded cat. It’s fast and very configurable so I can deal with the alpha/beta crashiness for the moment.

One thing that I always find interesting about standalone .deb packages is that they almost never add a menu entry when installed. This seems odd because Debian has a unified menu system that gets rid of a lot of the KDE/Gnome-centricity that other distros fall into. It would be nice to have a menu entry for even beta software because to be perfectly honest I’m going to forget all about it in a couple of days. Bug squishing isn’t helped when people forget that they even have the software installed. I know it’s nitpicky but I think that extra step would be beneficial for both developers and users. I’m pretty sure that there are more than a few OS/free software developers that would be happy to never see a bug report from me again. I tend to stumble on really craptacular bugs and I have sort of a guilt complex about it. Some days I feel like the guy from the military that has to pay visits to announce the death of a family member. OK, hyperbole but you get the point.

Go grab a copy of Liferea, though. It’s not ready for production (like feed reading is production work) but I think it’s an open ended enough application to give the fussbudgets something to play around with for 45 minutes or so. This is also very high up on my “check back in on this project in a couple of months” list. That list is freakishly long these days which I think really says something about the quality of software that people have been working on over the past year or so. I’m not saying that things weren’t amazingly good in the past but the momentum seems to have been bumped up a notch in the last year. That’s good news for everybody.

Oh, and it’s also very nice that Liferea has its help files built in as channels. That is a fine idea that keeps documentation matched with its version.