Since the announcement of the demise of Google Reader, many developers have started working on new projects that can help users replace Google Reader as their default RSS reader. Before the news hit the internet, the majority of people were reluctant to switch to any other RSS client as this one was one of the best and was available free of cost. Today, I stumbled yet another handy RSS reading client, Syndifeed.
Syndifeed is a very handy online RSS client that takes the simplicity of The Old Reader and feeling of Feedly. With Syndifeed, you can subscribe to all your favourite blogs and read them from where ever you are. Let’s take a look.
Getting Started
To get started, you must sign up for an account on Syndifeed which hardly takes a minute. Just go to Syndifeed homepage and enter the required details. After the registration is complete, you will be redirected to your dashboard showing you some of the latest news from the web.
Personally, I like the interface of the app as it’s really clean and simple. The list of feeds are shown in the right side bar with all the posts on the dashboard as shown below.
Adding Feeds
One of the first things any user who is planning to switch from Google Reader to any other RSS client is whether he can import his subscriptions from Google Reader or not. The process of adding every feed one by one can be a time consuming task. Luckily, the process of importing subscriptions to Syndifeed takes less than a minute, unlike The Old Reader where I had to wait for almost 10 days to get my feeds transferred from Google Reader.
Just click on My Account and go to Feeds from the sidebar. From there you will be able to add new feeds to the list. Just enter the name and URL of the website you want to follow and click on Add. All the websites you are subscribed to will appear under Edit Feeds section. If you want, you can manually delete any specific website from there.
To import feeds from Google Reader, you need to first create a backup of your Google Reader subscriptions. If you don’t have your Google Reader backup, we have covered a guide to help you create a backup of your Google Reader feeds. Now, scroll down the same Feeds page and browse the location of your subscriptions.xml file. As I said earlier, the transfer process was simple took hardly 10 seconds.
Some Useful Features
The service offers its users with some nice features. When you click on any article, it will open the article in the same window as a popup where you will be able to read your feeds in a clean and ad free user interface. Apart from reading yours Newsfeed, you can also save the article for later reading on Syndifeed or save it on Instapaper if you use it. If you want, you can even share the articles from Syndifeed to different social networks including Google+, Twitter and Facebook.
Some websites have enabled excerpt view on their posts, in that case, you have to open the complete post in a new tab by clicking on View External option.
All the articles that you save using Syndifeed can be found in the Saved tab on the taskbar. The articles saved in Syndifeed are sorted according to the date they were saved and shows the most recent saved article first. This feature is already available in some RSS clients like Feedly.
You can even create new folders and organize them according to our own preferences as well. There is an option to create and edit folders in the sidebar.
The service also has a mobile friendly interface meaning you can open Syndifeed on your mobile device and view your RSS feeds in a mobile friendly interface. You can select your feeds from the list view them on your device, clutter-free.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Syndifeed is a very useful RSS client that may be considered as a worthy Google Reader alternative. However, the app has some flaws as well. When I was trying to add folders from settings, I had to try a couple of times before it added the folders. Despite of a mobile friendly interface, I would love if the service has a dedicated mobile app to check the feeds.
But I don’t think these flaws matter that much as the main functionality is importing and reading RSS feeds in a clutter free interface. The developers have said that they have some cool new features which will be released soon. So let’s wait and hope for some feature that is not present in any other RSS client.