News: Reading Feeds in Your Account

The news area is a feed reader. You subscribe to the sites you follow, and instead of visiting twenty of them to find out whether anything happened, you get one stream of articles, newest first. It sits in the same account as your bookmarks, which is the point of having it here at all: in practice both cover the same handful of websites.

Subscribing to a feed

Almost every news site, blog and forum publishes a feed, a machine readable version of its front page. The address usually ends in /feed or /rss, and many sites show a small feed icon that links to it. Copy that address, that is all Bookmax needs. Both common formats, RSS and Atom, are read.

The plus in the header of the news panel on the left adds a subscription. You give it a name, paste the address into the field for the feed URL, and optionally pick a colored icon. The pencil edits an entry, the wastebasket removes it.

Keeping subscriptions in order

Subscriptions are arranged like folders. Drag one by its icon: up and down changes its position, left and right changes the level, so you can group news, sport and work into separate branches and read one branch at a time. Selecting a branch merges everything below it into one stream.

Three ways to read

The stream can be shown as headlines only, which is the fastest way through a long list; as a compact list with a line of text under each headline; or as tiles with the images the feed delivers. Further articles load as you scroll. On a phone only the tile view is offered, because the switches for the other two need more width than a phone has.

Taking your subscriptions with you

Feed readers exchange subscription lists as OPML files, and Bookmax reads and writes them. That means a list from another reader can be brought over in one file, and it can be taken away again the same way. Your subscriptions are not locked in here.

What the reader does not do

Articles are not stored in your account. They are fetched from the feeds and kept in a cache, so what you see is what a feed currently offers, not an archive. When a publisher drops an item from its feed, it disappears here as well. Every page of the stream reads the subscribed feeds and merges them, which means a very long subscription list is noticeably slower than in a reader that keeps every article in a database of its own.

Limits

A free account can subscribe to ten feeds. A Premium account has no limit and can also use the import and export functions. The background of the feed reader, and how it compares to a dedicated one, is described on the page about the bookmark manager with a built-in RSS reader.