RSS Reader Offline

[Lutherian]

Hi all.

This one's for the laptop users - I'm sure this will sound familiar.

I use a feedreader (liferea) OK fine.

I'm told it's an offline reader.

No it's not. Nor is GreatNews (Windows), Nor is snownews (linux CLI)

True, If I take my laptop offline, I will see the feed, but if I click on the link ... yup
I'm not going to see the whole article, so for the sake of definition.

UNLESS A FEED READER IS CAPABLE OF RETRIEVING THE FEED AND THE LINKED ARTICLE FROM THE ORIGINATING WEBSITE, DOWNLOADING IT TO A LOCAL CACHE - IT SHALL BE KNOWN AS AN ONLINE FEEDREADER - PERIOD!

So after 2 days of searching for scripts with wget or curl - none of which worked, I collapse on the floor, exhausted, tired, hungry and sleep deprived - my voice echos against the mountains as I scream,

where, oh where may I find the one true offline reader

(If think my prose sucks you should see me butcher scripts!)

[paulasimoes]

Hi
I have the same problem, most of the rss readers say that you can read the feeds offline, but that it is not true. My problem is that I subscribe feeds from blogs with pictures that are important to understand the post like blogs about typography.

I tried Straw [http://www.gnome.org/projects/straw/] and I can see the images offline, but it is very buggy, sometimes crashes and sometimes do not show the feeds.

If you find a real offline feed reader, please let me know.

For now, and for real important things I am using zotero, a firefox extension that can take a picture of the site you are viewing, but it is not automatic

[Sebastral]

Agreed, as long as you can't read the whole post incl pictures offline it's an online reader. As I can't be online every single day I need a solution that updates the headlines daily so I can download the headlines of several days at ones in my RSS reader/organizer. cause it seems to be up to the blog how long the (or how many) headlines can be feeded..

[jimmy the saint]

I agree 100%. The only reason I would need an offline reader is for when I am OFFLINE!!! If I am online, how hard would it be for me to bookmark a page and look through the site since I am already .... online.

[bornagainpenguin]

/BUMPing this for interest.

I used to use MobiPocket in Windows to get my feeds and push them to my organizer. Later on I discovered I could copy the feeds over to my laptop and read them offline when I am unable to connect to a WiFi signal. I've been playing with Lifera but it doesn't seem to work well as an OFFline viewer. Mobipocket isn't an option for me as the only way I've seen that seems to work in Wine involves using IE4Linux... I moved to Ubuntu to get AWAY from IE!

Anyone have any ideas or know any settings I can set to make Lifera (or some other Linux based app) truly work OFFline?

--bornagainpenguin

[diverbelow]

As of today I am no longer using Liferea as it is not an off line rss reader. As I have to commute to work via Max rail, I synchronize my rss feeds then suspend my laptop. Well, I forgot to suspend my laptop, and when I powered up and opened Liferea, I was not able to view any new feeds that was sync earlier that day.

I saw straw was an off line rss feed, so I installed straw and importing my rss list from Liferea was a snap. I turned off my wireless to test straw and was reading the full articles with pictures in straw.
Yes, straw is currently under development, but at times, it was very slow to move around, but it worked off line rss reader.

[Psy-Q]

I saw that this post is still being bumped, so here are a few of my experiences. Mobile Internet access is extremely expensive in Switzerland, and I'm not a millionaire yet, so I've been trying to find a good offline feed/news reading solution for quite some time.

The combination I'm using right now is:

1. Firefox
2. Google Reader with Google Gears to enable offline mode
3. "Read it later" Firefox extension

For all the feeds that have their full article content in the actual RSS feed, Google Reader on its own works quite well. It will retrieve up to 2000 unread items for you, including their full text.

For those feeds that force you to go to the originating site before you get the full text, I just right-click the triangle symbol on the right of the article title, which will always link to the original article in Google Reader. Then I mark it as "Read it later". This adds it to the Read It Later reading list.

When I'm done picking the most interesting articles, I click "Read Offline" in the Read It Later menu (top right corner of the Firefox window). This downloads all the pages that I've marked for reading. Now I can unplug my lappy, put my coffee cup in the sink and run off to my train for 20 minutes of happy offline feed reading.

This is a less than ideal solution for a few reasons: If your feed source does not include the full text, it means that you have to check your list of stories for interesting bits and mark them for download separately. Also, on some times it's the bits that do not show up in the feed that are most interesting -- discussions on Slashdot, for example. Even though Slashdot publishes the whole article in the feed, this means I still have to "Read it later" those pages, and heavy AJAX in the comments system can kill the whole idea.

AJAX in general is the enemy of the offline person.

Have any of you managed to find a true offline feed reader in the meantime?