Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Attensa RSS Reader for Outlook

October 20, 2005

Software/Web Apps

I had heard about this util­ity a cou­ple of weeks ago. I decided to down­load it last week to try it out. I had used SharpReader before my com­puter got reim­aged a cou­ple of weeks ago.

I have been read­ing a book called Tak­ing Back Your Life, Using Out­look to Get Orga­nized and Stay Orga­nized. One of the con­cepts in the book is that you min­i­mize your col­lect­ing points for infor­ma­tion. This is what moti­vated me to try Attensa.

Here is my review:

Attensa worked much like SharpReader in that it cre­ated fold­ers in Out­look based on the cat­e­gories you want to sort your feeds into. You can keep things like you do in SharpReader and delete the posts that you are not inter­ested in. You can choose three dif­fer­ent way to have the posts dis­played: plain text, default view which describes itself as faster and richer and then source web page con­tents (which they say is the slow­est) which looks like the web­site. I have been using the Default view and the one quirk I have found in it is that it dis­played apos­tro­phes as boxes. Attensa has tag func­tions but I have not yet played with that. You can for­ward the arti­cles through Out­look to oth­ers and you can post to your blog with the Attensa util­ity bar in Out­look but I have not yet tried that either.

In com­par­i­son to other read­ers, I have not used the RSS reader in Fire­fox and I did a lit­tle with Blog­lines. I had also been play­ing with Google’s reader but was not real keen on it because I could not get rid of posts that I was not inter­ested in. Attensa has pro­vided me a pretty good solu­tion as I am try­ing to inte­grate things from the Tak­ing Back Your Life book.