Posted: 15 Feb 2005

In December, I wrote an article about rss newsfeeds. In it, I covered a newsfeed aggregator that I was using at the time. Since then, however, I have made a great discovery. It is called Akregator. Since starting to use it, I have also found out that it has been made part of KDE.

Installing it is quite easy. If you are using SUSE 9.2 Professional, follow the guide found here. It will show you how to gain access to this and several hundred additional updates. Once you've completed the steps outlined there, install the 'akregator' package in YAST. Alternatively, if you want to download and install it manually, you can get it here.

Once you have it installed, go ahead and run it. To find it, click on the K Menu, then INTERNET, then AKREGATOR (It might also be in a submenu):

When you run it, you are presented with the main window, which conveniently furnishes you with some tips to get started:

For locating rss newsfeeds, I recommend http://feedfinder.feedster.com/. When you've found one you want to add to Akregator, right-click on the orange XML icon, and select COPY LINK LOCATION:

Then, go back into Akregator. We'll just follow the instructions provided there.

Right-click on ALL FEEDS, and select ADD FEED from the menu that appears:

Another window pops up. Paste the address of the newsfeed into this window, and click OK:

The FEED PROPERTIES window appears, asking for confirmation. In most cases, you can just click OK:

Your new feed appears in the left pane of the Akregator window:

If you select that feed, the news articles appear in the top pane on the right:

If you select an article, a summary appears in the pane below the list:

If the article looks interesting, click on the COMPLETE STORY link, and the web page containing the story appears in a new tab.

This is the very basic usage of Akregator. Feel free to browse the menus and set preferences as you wish. There is a lot of very cool features in this application.

I recently submitted some feature requests to the authors of this software. I contacted Frank Osterfeld, the official project maintainer, to see when I could expect the new version with the new features to appear. He told me that it should be out sometime in the month of March!

Akregator is a sweet app that you should take a look at when you get the chance. If you use newsfeeds, it's a great bet.

Also, remember that we have a whole page full of great rss feeds!