When I have free time, I enjoy surfing to my favorite websites to catch up on the latest news from the world, technology, games, and business. While I have evolved from typing the URLs manually to a favorite list to a set of homepages thanks to tabbed browsing, I have found that RSS feeds are the best way to get information quickly and easily. The majority of websites today have RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds, which let you grab headlines and information without actually launching your browser. Today I will look at Abilon News Aggregator, an RSS feed reader program. Using Abilon, you can collect together hundreds of RSS feeds into one place, so you’ll never be far from world events.
As I frequently note about quality freeware, the installation was quick and does ask about Desktop and/or Program Menu shortcuts. When you first open Abilon, you choose from different subject areas such as Entertainment, Health, News, Technology, etc. To see what the program offers, I chose to load everything. It took only a few moments to load roughly 100 feeds with around 3100 individual stories. You will occasionally find a discontinued feed, but overall, the list can be frequently updated. You can easily remove a dead feed with a couple clicks. Perusing through the feeds, you will find topics from a variety of web logs (blogs) and websites.
A feed tree sits on the left of the program window. Clicking on the main topics, “News” for example, will load all the headlines within that topic, or you can expand the topic to view headlines from a specific feed. The headlines are listed in the center panel, while the feed description sits in the right panel. The description field occasionally shows the full article, but more often a simple phrase or sentence. To read the whole story, you can click on the headline in either the feed or description field. The webpage will open in a tab within Abilon. Finally, a small area in the lower left corner called “Memories” allows you to store and organize articles to remember in your own folders.
There are numerous customization options, both for the program’s View and the Feeds themselves. You can customize the view by resizing columns, adding Newspaper View (just one panel with headlines and descriptions next to the folder tree); change the style of the description field from the Default to Forum or for touch of retro – Terminal. Lastly, you can switch between horizontal and vertical splits as well as show or remove feed descriptions.
You can customize the Feeds by adding individual RSS or ATOM feeds or a whole group of feeds. You can reorganize categories, delete uninteresting feeds and groups. To better follow the stories, you can mark them as read or unread. Use the Find to search the feeds, and click on the toolbar buttons to Update All and to move forward and backwards through the feeds.
Some extra features include blogging tools to quickly take a story and Send to Blog, and a basic editor to send an entire entry to your blog. The general settings allow you to setup startup launch, fonts, automatic update intervals, etc. The included Help file explains the programs features adequately. Unfortunately the developer’s website no longer exists, so the program comes as is. However, I have not found any bugs that would stop me from using Abilon. It is still a very capable program.
In conclusion, Abilon is a very handy tool to keep you up to date on all of your favorite web pages. Spend some time adding your own favorites to Abilon, but spend some time perusing the other feeds it has to offer. You might find some new favorites. Abilon is only 600kb to download, so you can enjoy it no time: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/News-Newsgroups-Blog-Tools/Abilon.shtml
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