Attensa

The day before yesterday I was singing an ode to Bloglines but I was following my own advice of really checking out other feed readers, and today it really paid off:

Attensa online [attensa.com] is the maybe to most minimalistic reader around (all you basically can do is to

• subscribe and manage your feeds
• read them in one of three available views
• and delete items or mark them read)

but it has one feature, which makes it the killer application for reading news, linkstreams (like Hotlinks, digg, or del.icio.us), and feeds which come in some crippled excerpt mode only: you can switch between a RSS and a Web view. The RSS view gives you the textual representation of the feed, but the Web view loads the original site referred to from the feed right within Attensa.

Attensa also lets you create nested groups of feeds, so all you have to do is invest some time in organizing your feeds according to your feed reading modes, then click on the channel you want to process, make sure the Web view is enabled, move your cursor to the delete button for the items and start exploring.

This is great for feeds, which point to many links you actually want to read, because you can read them (and the associated comments and so on) right within Attensa, but this is absolutely fabulous for feeds, which only point to a few, because you can delete about 5 items per second and really process feeds in a highly effective manner.

(There is one minor annoyance: some sites – like the Wikipedia – seem to take over the window Attensa is running in, so you need to switch to the RSS mode when stumbling upon them.)