As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am trying out a different approach to feed reading. I am using offline aggregator from KDE – akregator.
It works pretty good for me. I can even say that it works better than I expected. All my feed reading is now done only on my notebook (which is my primary computer now anyway). I can better rearrage feeds in folders, subfolders, subfolders, subfolders, etc. I can better control the archiving of items – per feed, with time based history or quantity based history. I can refresh all feeds manually, or one by one, or do it automatically, with custom settings per feed.
It all looks great, but I need more.
Most importantly I miss tagging. It looks like it will be implemented in the next version of akregator, but I need it now. Urgent. C’mon!
I found out today, that I can delete items, leaving for archives only those that I might need – useful feature, but a dialogue asking me if I am really sure that I want to delete keeps coming up. I don’t see any way of disabling it. Boring.
Marking is too simplistic. I mark feeds either as read/unread and important. I hope that tagging will sort this out, because I really need more options.
Notes are missing. I would really appreciate if I could leave a small note explaining why I saved the item. Even better if I could have a yellow marker functionality to draw attention straight to the important place in the item.
Maintenance tools are non-existing. There are no statistics at all (how many feeds do I have, how many archives items, how many read/unread items, etc). I can’t find dead feeds. I can’t search for broken feeds.
Handy tools are missing. I can’t email an item or bookmark it from akregator. I have to open the webpage and to it all from there. I can’t save images – only print them.
What is even worse is that there is no plugin infrastructure. The only two ways for me to expand the functionality is to either patch the source code of akregator or do some dcop trickery. Neither one of these excites me.
Hopefully with all RSS and KDE hype, akregator will get some activity. I’m really waiting…
One thought on “Akregator is good, but I need more”