But for the feeds that it was able to fetch, Blam! was ok. I see the news immediately and it was readable. The layout was neat too. You just see the titles on the upper part of the main pane first and when you click that, the news will appear on the lower part of the main pane. If the feed of the blog you’re following is only showing summaries then you could click the “Show in browser” link at the bottom of the news. It will show you the complete blog entry on your browser. You could also start commenting on the blog entry, if you’d like to interact with the blogger.

To add a new feed, it’s as simple as going to the “Channel” menu and click “Add new channel” and you will see a dialog box prompting you to add the URL and the username and password — which are, more often than not, unnecessary. The keyboard shortcut for this is “Ctrl-N”. Blam! also supports importing and exporting of OPML files.

This is a straightforward feed reader. If you want your graphics and stuff right away, this might be a good option for you if you don’t have fancy shmancy needs.

Post from: New Linux User

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Enter Newsbeuter. It is a terminal-based RSS reader which you could easily use and tweak according to your needs. For one thing you could export your OPML file and use that as a basis of your list of feeds. At the same time, you could also go start from scratch and all you need is a text files with all of the feed URLs of your choice. If you’re looking for a way to tag these feeds, don’t worry. Your text file can indicate the tags to be used for them. You just need a file called “urls” in your .newsbeuter directory and you’re good to go.

What I like about reading in Newsbeuter is that I could focus on the news and not look at the pictures yet. Sometimes pictures take too long to load on my computer and it gets irritating when there are too many pictures loading. At least if I could get the textual content right away, I could decide to open the article in a browser later on to view the pictures, etc. I also like how Newsbeuter is quick. One more thing that Newsbeuter has going for it is the keyboard shortcuts used. You’ve got “o” to open it in a browser, “q” to quit reading an article, “s” to save the article as a text file, and so on. There are also many things you could tweak so that you could use it according to your needs. I have yet to tweak it so I could easily manage podcasts.

It’s been a week since I started using Newsbeuter and I really like it. So far, I can’t see anything else that might replace it.

Post from: New Linux User

welcome

I am not an expert in terms of sys ad skills and stuff like that but I do love using Linux. I am just like one of you who — I am looking for ways to improve the way my computer works while using Linux. And it’s not always an easy task. Sometimes it could get quite complicated because of the number of steps it would take to fix the problem/s.  But that’s fun about using Linux anyway.  There are a lot of things to learn along the way.  Sometimes we might feel terrible about ourselves while trying to troubleshoot problems.  But everything has a solution.  Although some of them might not be quite as elegant as we would hope for.

And as new readers and new Linux users, you could share your thoughts too.  I hope that you wouldn’t feel too shy or hesitant.   You might have some great insights that musn’t be kept to yourselves.

Post from: New Linux User