Get Over Google Reader with Liferea

You must have heard that Google Reader will be shutting down on July 1. Since the news broke, everyone and their aunt have been talking and writing about Google's merciless decision which has left many users disappointed. Still, it's not the end of the world; there are plenty of other applications to choose from, both desktop and web-based. Advice on how to migrate from Google Reader and recommendations of replacement apps are popping up all over the Web. In view of that, it seems appropriate to present Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) – a simple yet mighty RSS reader for Linux which can fill that Google-Reader-hole in your soul. 

Image credit: Mashable

Liferea aims to be a lightweight RSS reading solution, but it has all the options you need. For the most part, they correspond to Google Reader's options, so you shouldn't have trouble getting used to Liferea. The main difference is that Liferea is a desktop application, and as such it is OS-dependent (in this case, a Linux-only application). Unlike Google Reader, you can't use it from any computer and it uses more bandwidth because it has to download all the RSS items.

On the other hand, desktop RSS readers are more secure because your feeds can't be accessed by third parties. With Liferea, you can browse feed contents even when you're not connected to the Internet thanks to its offline mode. The biggest advantage is that you don't depend on an online service, its ups and downs and potential shutdown. Liferea will keep working on your computer even if the developers decide to stop updating it. This gives you complete control over your RSS feeds.

Getting Started with Liferea

You can install Liferea from the official repositories of your Linux distribution, or download and compile the source from the project webpage. Make sure to install the latest stable version (at the moment of writing, it's 1.8.12).

Liferea starts with some preset feeds which you can freely remove. The interface is straightforward; all options are easily accessible and clearly distinguishable. By default, Liferea places an icon in your system tray, providing some basic control over the application (switch to offline mode, adjust preferences, update feeds). Hovering over the tray icon will show the number of new and unread items (if there are any). Of course, you can turn off this functionality in the Preferences dialog.

Liferea Preferences dialogDetailed documentation is available to help you tweak Liferea. You can set how the feeds and folders will be organized, how often you wish to update them, and whether Liferea should use a proxy. You can open links directly in Liferea or in an external browser. Enclosures are basically attachments – images, video and audio content - that may come with some feed items. You can choose whether you want to download them automatically, as well as which software should be used to open them.

Apart from general preferences, each feed you add has its own Properties dialog. This is useful if you don't want to update all feeds at the same time, as you can set different update intervals for each feed. You can also enforce or disable notifications for each feed, and if necessary, use conversion filters. They extend the functionality of Liferea and can convert unreadable or unsupported feed formats to those which Liferea can recognize.

Migration from Google Reader to Liferea can be done in just a few clicks, provided that you have already exported your feeds into an XML or an OPML file. From the Subscriptions menu, choose Import Feed List, select your exported file, and you're done. Liferea is now the new master of your RSS feeds. 

Import feeds from Google ReaderThe original folder structure (if you had one) from Google Reader will be preserved, but you can add new folders and delete or rename existing ones. Liferea supports drag-and-drop folder and feed rearrangement, as well as alphabetical feed sorting.

Wide viewing modeThere are three viewing modes in Liferea – Normal, Wide (see above) and Combined (see below). The navigation pane on the left contains all your feeds and folders, and the RSS items (headlines) are always displayed on the right. You can toggle Reduced Feed List from the View menu; it removes folders from the navigation pane, leaving only feeds that have unread items.

Combined viewing mode

Selecting a headline will open its contents in the preview pane. However, if you right-click a headline, a number of options appears: you can open it in a new tab within Liferea or in your default browser, change its Read status, remove it, flag or save it, copy the URL to clipboard or share it on a bookmarking service of your choice. The list of supported services is quite long - from Twitter, Reddit, Google Plus and StumbleUpon to Instapaper, Digg, Facebook and more. You can find it under Tools - Preferences – Headlines – Web Integration. 

Awesome Features

Advanced users will be happy to hear that Liferea supports custom CSS for its feed content preview. In other words, if you want to read all items in Liferea but you're not satisfied with how they're displayed, you can change this by editing the liferea.css file in your /home/username/.liferea_1.8 folder.

Another great thing is the support for Gmail inbox RSS feeds. Perhaps you know that Google provides a feed of new messages for your Gmail account. To read your email from Liferea, subscribe to this feed as you would to any other. Liferea will ask for your Gmail login information (it is stored locally in plain-text format) and fetch your messages on command.

As if all this isn't enough, Liferea has two more outstanding features – News Bins and Search Folders – which you can use to effectively manage your feeds. News Bins are folders to which you can save the items you like. They are permanently stored on your computer, and you can create as many Bins as you want to organize the information you need, whether it's for a research project or your cookie recipe collection.

Filter Content with Search Folders

Search Folders are saved searches which can be used as dynamic feed filters. This is a feature that Google Reader unfortunately lacks. Although it was possible to implement it with Greasemonkey scripts, they would stop working every time Google changed something in the Reader code.

Search Folder properties

With Liferea, you can set search parameters (or rules) for feed titles, item title and body, read status, flag status, categories and podcasts. A simple search filter would be to show all unread items. You can create a new search folder from the Subscriptions menu or by clicking the Search All Feeds button. In the dialog box, select Add to create a new rule. From the first dropdown menu you would select “Read status” and from the second “is unread”. Give it a name and click OK; it will be shown in the navigation pane and updated automatically as new items are added to Liferea.

Although the official documentation says the search rules are case insensitive, I've had the opposite experience. When adding search rules for item titles, the results were displayed properly only when I wrote them in the exact case (for example, “Skyrim” with the first letter uppercase). Sometimes there would be no results for a search string even though items with that name existed. Support for “negative” filtering; that is, hiding the items which contain a keyword, is not included by default (though it's possible to achieve this by adding all items to a folder and searching for those which don't contain a keyword). Apparently this feature needs some improvement. Also, note that search folders do not behave like “real” feeds, so you can't automatically remove all items from them.

Other than this, I didn't experience any bugs or crashes; Liferea worked perfectly and proved to be stable. When marking all items as read, it does get a bit slow, but this depends less on the application itself and more on the number of feeds you add, as well as on your system resources. For this very reason I would advise against selecting the option to check all feeds at startup. This will most likely slow down your computer and it might even break your Internet connection. It's much better to manually check feeds once Liferea is started by clicking the Update All button.

A Decent Replacement

All in all, I'm very pleased with Liferea and I'll continue using it instead of Google Reader. It fulfills the main four conditions that I require from an RSS reader, namely: feed filtering (Search Folders take care of this), custom folders, marking items as important (or flagging) and marking all items as read (this sounds like a basic, no-brainer feature, but you'd be surprised how many apps don't have it).

The social aspect – sharing, commenting, following other users – that seemed to be popular on Google Reader is absent here because it's a desktop application. If this element is not crucial to you, give Liferea a chance. In case it doesn't suit you, try Akregator, BlogBridge or the powerful RSSOwl.

There are many online alternatives if you don't like the desktop approach. Feedly is the most popular and most often recommended for both computers and mobile devices, but we covered other RSS readers for smartphones as well.

Naturally, you can continue using Google Reader until the last minute – there's no need to make the switch immediately. This might sound too optimistic, but Google might change its mind, or maybe the whole Google Reader situation is an elaborate April Fools' prank.

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.