I now have a new RSS reader I think I am mostly happy with. I say I think because I need to play with the settings a bit and how it looks, and live with it for a while. Altogether I tried out 16, not counting Abilon and I've ended up with one called RSSBandit.

If you click on a particular feed, or group of feeds, it'll show you everything from the newest to oldest on one page, which is quite cool. You have to click on the actual post itself for it to work out you've read it, though. It shows which category the post is in, which is quite cool. Abilon doesn't, although I've not noticed because I've never really noticed anyone use categories. It doesn't make a sound when it finds new posts. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or not at the moment.

The one good thing that Abilon does is integrates well with Livejournal and Yahoo. But which I mean you can just give it the name of the user or community on LJ and it'll work out the address of the RSS feed. And whether or not you can view friends locked posts, as long as you are logged in in Abilon.

In RSSBandit you have to tell it it needs to authorise the feed and give it your username and password - for each feed separately. Which also means updating the address of each one to match with LJs new addresses. It has complained about people with underscores in their usernames, I'm not sure whether it's happy now.

Where RSSBandit scores over Abilon is for RSS feeds that are titles only. It works out that this is the case, and automatically takes you to the page, so you can see it. So now I can read Avon, Ann and Nic's LJs again without having to make an effort to visit their actual LJs! And I can read Tolkien Weekly posts again - or could if the layout didn't mean it's a tiny thin little column on the very right of my screen.

So that's basically how I've spent my weekend. Apart from being behind on my viewing - I've now got two episodes of Johnny and the Bomb to watch - there were only three to begin with. I've had to put a new tape in to record Lewis (which clashes with Auf Weidersehen, Pet, and anyway, I'm not ready).

Last night, though, was Burns Night. There are photos on the Wallingford Rotaract website. I didn't get to eat haggis (a bad thing, as I like it). But I did get chocolate cake bars for pudding, so I can't complain really. The celidh was good fun - although also involved the most scary thing I've done this year when Al, who I was dancing with at the time, picked me up. Apparently it was quite a funny sight. I was too busy holding on and just generally being scared to think about anything else!

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