Thursday, April 02, 2009

Viewing RSS feeds by Webpage with Windows Live Reader

I use the Windows Live Mail client (available from Live Downloads) to read all of my RSS feeds.  One of the things that bothers me about RSS is how the feed doesn’t contain the entire item, so you get something like this:

The strangest thing happened the other day when I combined an olive, a cyclist and a … (read more)

Now you’re forced to view it online, and you have to open a web browser.  Windows Live Mail has a feature that allows you to view the webpage in the mail reader.

Edit RSS Feed

Simply check the “Show articles as web page, instead of summary”.  Now instead of loading in the RSS feed summary, that blog post opens directly in the mail client.  I find this works out great for those short feeds as above, or perhaps as a photo blog where they show their small un-viewable thumbnail in the feed. 

Where it breaks down is when the post has a lot of comments, they are all loaded as if you were looking at the webpage.  Additionally, I don’t think this works with offline viewing, but it’s a time saver while you’re connected!


2 comments:

Andy Parkes said...

Partial feeds annoy the hell out of me

When you have lots of feeds to go through having to break out into a new window is very annoying

I'm at the stage that i unsubscribe sites that only give partial feeds unless they have REALLY good content!

Anonymous said...

Great post. RSS feeds if ever properly provided with a 'meets ever need' feature set, would transform communication exponentially among consultants.

My dream would be to not only have such a great RSS reader but have the read/not read status and the feeds follow me around to the various OS and desktops I sit at as a consultant. The common IE feed is a step in the right direction but doesn't quite cut it as there needs to be two way sync of the feed list and directory reconfiguration of existing folders and feeds whenever such an edit occurs. This also has to be available to export or sync over the cloud so to take it with you - perhaps a simple USB file sync and load would suffice such that all RSS feeds come from that single source and the status is also kept up to date in one place.