Liferea


Liferea is a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports the major feed formats including RSS/RDF and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in OPML format. Liferea is intended to be a fast, easy to use, and easy to install news aggregator for GTK+ that can be used with the GNOME desktop. Liferea features a script manager, in which users can add custom scripts that run whenever a certain action occurs.
Liferea also supports podcasting.

Pronunciation

The lead programmer of Liferea, Lars Windolf, who is German, pronounces the name of the software.

Distinguishing features

It is written in C and uses no interpreted language.
To easily read linked articles or weblog comments, Liferea allows reading websites using an embedded browser, which can be either Mozilla/Firefox/XulRunner, GtkHTML or, in newer versions, Webkit. Additionally, the user can configure many predefined external browsers with which to open links.
It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML, many of which its contemporaries cannot.
By sorting subscriptions into folders, the user can read all headlines of a folder at once. By enabling a filtering preference, all previously read headlines of the folder can be hidden.
Similar to the mail client Evolution, Liferea supports search folders, which allow the user to save searches. Each search folder contains all headlines that match its user-defined search rules.
Liferea does allow synchronizing against 3rd party services as TinyTinyRSS and TheOldReader.

Browser integration

In Web there is a news feed subscription extension, which allows adding news feeds when viewing websites.
For Firefox 1.5+ there is an extension that allows adding subscriptions by simple clicking the LiveBookmarks icons in the Firefox address bar.
Since Firefox 2.0+, Liferea can be used without a special extension. To subscribe to new feeds from within Firefox, the Liferea helper script "liferea-add-feed" has to be configured in the Firefox feed subscription preferences.