I use FeedDemon for all my blog/feed reading and have done so for many years. I really love FeedDemon and I cannot think of a feature that it is missing. Nick Bradbury has done a great job with FeedDemon and it continues to flourish with the NewsGator acquisition. I love the fact that I can keep my feeds and what I’ve read vs. not read in sync between many computers. My typical usage pattern is to use FeedDemon at home and the NewsGator browser interface at home. So if I subscribe to something new or mark something as read at work, I don’t have to do that again at home.

Nick has just put out the beta of the latest version (v2.0) and he’s made a great product even better. My only compliant so far is that the synchronization is renaming my feeds – I will typically rename the feed from the creative title/tag-line to the person’s name so I know whose feed I am reading and it seems like FeedDemon is re-discovering feed attributes on sync.

Along with the beta of FeedDemon, I have been playing with the latest web-based, AJAX enabled feed (RSS/ATOM) reader from Alex King called FeedLounge. Alex has done a great in creating this PHP Phyton based feed reader and it is really very functional for a web interface. I signed up for a paid account and have been playing with it for the past week and you can tell how popular FeedLounge is as I am noticing growing pains. The application has gotten slower and slower and crawls to a halt for a couple of minutes every once in a while. FeedLounge is really a beautifully written web application and offers the 3-pane layout, (among others) which usually sells me on user interfaces. FeedLounge imports OPML files, allows you to tag blog entries and works great in FireFox.

I started my paid subscription of FeedLounge to ‘check-out’ the application and not because I was looking to replace FeedDemon as my primary feed reader. FeedLounge does have all the features that I like and require but there is still something about a fat-client application running on your machine that can run offline. There is nothing missing in FeedLounge but I still can’t seem to make my self switch to it and that’s really odd and something I can’t explain. I am and have always been a huge proponent of web applications over fat-client application but I can’t seem to leave FeedDemon. Maybe FeedDemon is just that good?

Update: Alex corrected me – Apparently most of the backend for FeedLounge is written in Python. Thanks Alex

FeedDemon, FeedLounge, NewsGator, alex+king, nick+bradbury, rss, atom, opml, php, web2.0, ajax, fat-client