Last Updated on September 6, 2020
For people that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator (often known as a feed reader) makes keeping track of them easier. This type of software can be a time-saver as you don’t need to keep viewing tons of different websites. There are a number of different file formats which information publishers use. The most frequently ones are RSS and Atom. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.
Feed readers’ popularity has waned over the years. This is because feed readers aren’t really a central hub for internet content. These days, there’s a plethora of interesting information on a wide variety of platforms, including Twitter, Instagram and SoundCloud that don’t support RSS, and other services like YouTube and Pinboard that do support RSS but it’s not always clear how to find their feeds.
If you’re looking for software that acts as a central hub for internet content, you should try Fraidycat. It isn’t a feed reader. And while it does gather news headlines from websites, it has much wider coverage letting you follow interesting people via YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud streams, and more.
Fraidycat offers a browser extension for Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. There’s also a standalone program available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Both the browser extension and standalone program are free and open source software.
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Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Configuration
Page 4 – Summary