My Review of RSS Guard

Summary: RSS Guard is an extremely well-made and polished RSS client with excellent support for both basic and advanced features. It supports nested folders, discovering RSS feeds from URLs in multiple ways, custom update intervals, setting custom icons for feeds, tagging articles, Regex search, and automated filters using Javascript (e.g. blacklisting words). It's without doubt one of the best if not the best local RSS client available today.

Legend

✅ Positive remark.

⚠️ Caveat or issue.

❌ Missing functionality or critical issue.

Default Feeds

RSS Guard comes with the following default feeds:

• RSS Guard [folder]
  • Recent Commits to rssguard:master [https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/commits/master.atom]
  • RSS Guard Localization Activity [https://crowdin.com/project/rssguard/activity]
• Technology [folder]
  • NYT > Technology [https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Technology.xml]
  • Scott Hanselman's Blog [http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman]
  • Slashdot [http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMainatom]
  • The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml]
  • It's FOSS [https://itsfoss.com/feed]
  • MajorGeeks.Com [https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/rss]
• Misc [folder]
  • Lifehacker [https://lifehacker.com/rss]

Adding a Feed

✅ It's relatively easy to add a new feed in RSS Guard.

The first time the application runs, a dialog titled "Add new account" shows up. In it, you can select RSS/RDF/ATOM/JSON to start using RSS in RSS Guard. There are other options that you can select, but they are considered plugins in the Windows version and you can choose not to install them.

After adding an RSS account, a new dialog shows up for you to configure it. You can specify a title for the account, change its icon, and configure a proxy for it.

After you click OK, a third dialog appears asking if you "want to load the initial set of feeds." Choosing Yes loads the default feeds into the new account.

Although there is no button in the toolbar to add an RSS feed, it's rather easy to add one by right clicking on the feeds pane to show its context menu, or by clicking on Feeds -> Add Item -> Add new feed in the menubar.

Then you must input a URL, click a "Discover!" button, check the feed that you want to add, and click "Import checked feeds."

✅ RSS Guard automatically fills the URL field of its add feed dialog window with the contents of the clipboard, so you don't even need to paste a URL you copied, saving you a step.

Web (<link>) Support

✅ RSS Guard supports [adding feeds from webpage URLs].

✅ RSS Guard supports adding an invalid URL without scheme or URL path (e.g. only the domain name, www.virtualcuriosities.com instead of https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/).

✅ RSS Guard supports webpages that declare multiple RSS feeds, showing a list of discovered feeds for the user to select.

✅ RSS Guard's add feed dialog window is titled "Discover feeds," and its button "Discover!" instead of simply "Add feed," which more accurately describes its functionality.

⚠️ RSS Guard's discovery ability appears to discover more than just declared RSS feeds. On any blog made with WordPress on its default settings, it shows 5 different feeds with the same name, plus the comments feed, plus a sitemap.xml. Among the feeds with the same name, one has the type ATOM 1.0, one is RDF (RSS 1.0), and three are RSS 2.0/2.0.1. The issue is that the tabular interface only provides two columns, Title and Type, so there is no way to distinguish between these three feeds that have the same title and the same type. I'd expect there to be a column for the URL, or at least showing the URL of the selected feed under the table, or as a tooltip, but I guess you have to "Add single feed with advanced details" to see what its URL is.

Observation: upon further inspection, I understand what is happening. RSS Guard automatically tries the URLs /rss and /feed even if the homepage doesn't declare them (which is a good idea because some may forget to declare them). The issue is that if you access these URL paths on a WordPress website, you'll get redirected to the canonical URL for the RSS feed, which has the path /feed/. So all three feeds are actually the same feed, it's just that RSS Guard can't handle the redirections. I have checked, and WordPress actually emits a 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY HTTP status, not a 302 FOUND, so it's explicitly not a temporary redirect. You can't even make the argument that RSS Guard needs to add /rss because in the future /rss could redirect to a different URL than /feed/, as the web server explicitly tells it's actually going to be /feed/ forever. Even if it wasn't 301, I still think RSS Guard shouldn't include URLs it tried to discover when they redirect to a URL that is explicitly supported by the website given its declaration on the homepage, or at least mark them somehow, though I do notice that the declared URL appears higher on the list of discovery feeds, presumably due to the order of the discovery algorithm. P.S.: I decided to immortalize this observation in its own article [Why RSS Guard Adds The Same Feed Repeated Five Times].

Observation: I didn't know WordPress supported RDF and ATOM feeds. It only declares a RSS 2.0 feed in the HTML. But it seems there's a /feed/atom for ATOM, and /feed/rdf for RDF. I've read that ATOM is supposed to be a better format than the old RSS, so I wonder why it's not the default for WordPress. Surely every client already supports it? Maybe I should test that in my reviews.

Custom Automatic Update Intervals

✅ It's possible to set a custom update interval. From once per second to once per 166666 minutes and 40 seconds.

⚠️ There seems to be no way to just set once per day, or even once per hour. For reference, 1440 minutes equals one day. I have no idea who needs second-level precision for their RSS feeds update intervals.

⚠️ The default is once per 15 minutes, which is too low. See [How to Decide the Update Frequency of an RSS Feed] for details.

✅ It's also possible to disable fetching automatically.

✅ It's possible to use a global default instead of selecting an interval for each feed manually.

OPML Support

✅ RSS Guard supports importing and exporting OPML outlines, which can be used to transfer RSS feeds from one RSS client to another.

Other Observations

You can replace the description of the RSS feed with a custom description.

You can set a custom icon for the RSS feed.

Viewing Articles

✅ RSS Guard features a built-in web browser that can display the content inside the RSS feed or even the webpage content.

✅ RSS Guard provides a link to the webpage above the content pane. It reads "URL." It's also possible to copy this link by right clicking on articles.

⚠️ It seems RSS Guard doesn't display images by default, but it can be configured to display images via Tools -> Settings -> Feeds & articles -> Articles -> Display attachments directly in articles.

Layouts

✅ RSS guard has two layouts: one with a left pane plus two horizontal panes, and one with three vertical panes. The layout can be switched by clicking on View -> Switch layout on the menubar.

Managing Feeds

✅ Feeds can be reordered and moved by drag and drop.

✅ Feeds can be renamed.

✅ You can fetch a single feed or all feeds manually.

Folders

✅ RSS Guard supports organizing feeds in a nested folder hierarchy.

⚠️ To add a folder, you click on "Add a new category," which means folders are called "categories" in RSS Guard. However, in the "Add a new category" dialog, there's a field for selecting the parent category labelled "Parent folder." Their icons are also folders, so I don't know why they aren't just called folders consistently.

✅ You can set a custom description for each category.

✅ You can set a custom icon for each category, which is nice.

Feeds Panel

✅ Feeds have context menus with related actions.

⚠️ Double clicking a feed doesn't do anything.

✅ Double clicking a folder collapses/expands it.

✅ Supports multiple selection.

Managing Articles

✅ Articles can be marked as important.

✅ Articles can be marked as "Read" or "Unread." They arrive "Unread."

✅ Articles become "Read" when you click on them. You can customize this behavior in settings!

Articles List

✅ Columns can be clicked on to sort the articles.

✅ Columns have context menus. You can hide columns using this context menu.

✅ It's possible to reorder columns.

✅ RSS Guard uses both boldness and an icon to indicate status. Unread articles are bold and have a green circle in a default column. You can even change this icon to an envelope in settings!

✅ Articles have context menus with related actions.

✅ You can quickly mark an article as important with one click by clicking on a default column that indicates importance.

❌ RSS Guard doesn't support thumbnails for articles that contain images. There is a setting to use multi-line rows in the articles list, but there doesn't seem to be a column for thumbnail.

Categories and Tags

✅ RSS Guard supports categories and tags. It calls tags "labels."

⚠️ It's not obvious at all how you tag an article in RSS Guard. If you right click on an article before creating any labels, under the "Labels" submenu you'll have a disabled option labelled "No labels found." I believe there should be an "Add new label" option here. The documentation says that to add a label, you have to right click on "Labels" in the feed pane. However, strangely, there is no "Labels" in the feed pane when you create an RSS/ATOM/JSON account. Because the documentation uses online accounts as an example, at first I entertained the possibility that this could be a feature available only for syncing with online accounts, but considering how well-made RSS Guard is, I somehow doubted it would be lacking this feature for local RSS. It turns out that you can add labels in your local RSS account, but to do that, you have to make the "Labels" node appear on the feeds pane, because it's hidden by default. There is no option to display it on the menubar. To make the "Labels" item appear, you must select your local RSS account, click Accounts -> Edit Selected Account in the menubar, then in "Miscellaneous" check the option "Labels," and press OK. I don't know why labels are hidden by default for local RSS. There are also "Probes" (displays "Regex queries") and "Important" ("Important articles") hidden by default, which could be something useful as well.

❌ RSS Guard can't load categories declared by an RSS feed. It seems it's possible to write a script to do this, however [issue #746].

❌ RSS Guard doesn't support categorizing feeds except for placing them into folders.

Automation

✅ RSS Guard supports automated filters to automatically perform all sorts of tasks on fetched articles. These can be accessed with Articles -> Article Filters. It's literally Javascript. RSS Guard also provides the ability to test the script and preview its output.

Search

✅ RSS Guard has great search capabilities.

Search what?	How?	Supported
Articles	By title	✅ Yes.
Articles	By content	✅ Yes.
Articles	By author	✅ Yes.
Articles	By date	⚠️ Yes.
Articles	By category	⚠️ Yes.
Articles	By status	⚠️ Yes.
Articles	By feed	⚠️ Yes.
Feeds	By title	✅ Yes.
Feeds	By description	❌ No.
Snippet	By text	✅ Yes.

⚠️ RSS Guard can't search by specific dates, but can filter articles from today, yesterday, last 24 hours, last 48 hours, this week, and last week by clicking on a filter button above the articles list.

⚠️ Through this same button, you can filter articles that are unread, marked as important, have an attachment, or "have some score" (I don't know what that means as there doesn't seem to be a way to give articles a score). It's not possible to filter by the opposite (e.g. show only read articles).

⚠️ Only supports searching the currently selected feed OR tag.

✅ When an article is selected, you can search its displayed contents by clicking in the built-in web browser area and pressing Ctrl+F.

✅ RSS Guard supports Regex. To search articles by a regular expression, you must enable "Probes" in your account settings, then create on by right clicking on the "Regex queries" on the feeds panel.

Other Observations

RSS Guard displays the number of unread articles in its icon on the system tray, on the taskbar, and on its main window title.

RSS Guard supports basic HTTP authentication (with username plus password). I wonder what sort of RSS feed would require this?