RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit
Developers	Dare Obasanjo and Torsten Rendelmann
Release	2003 (2003)12
Stable release	1.9.0.10023  / 4 July 2010
Operating system	Windows
Type	News aggregator
License	BSD-3-Clause
Website	rssbandit.org

RSS Bandit is an open source RSS/Atom aggregator based on the Microsoft .NET framework. It was originally released as a code sample in a series of articles the Extreme XML column written by Dare Obasanjo on MSDN in 2003.¹² The code samples were developed into an open source project. It is currently hosted on GitHub⁴ and the primary contributors are Dare Obasanjo and Torsten Rendelmann.

The three-pane user interface is modeled after desktop email clients, with a tree view showing the list of feeds. The application has a number of features inspired by email readers and other RSS readers including:

• Search folders for reading all items that match a search term or just all unread items
• Import and export subscription lists as an OPML file
• Keyboard shortcuts for main functions
• Ability to download podcasts⁵
• Automatic marking of items as read as they are scrolled past
• Search in all feeds, across all updates from subscriptions
• Current subscription lists and read/unread state of items in the application can be synchronized via a FTP or WebDAV server, allowing use from multiple computers
• Feeds can be read from a Google Reader account, allowing the user to subscribe or unsubscribe from feeds, mark items as read or star them in RSS Bandit and have these changes reflected in Google Reader
• Feeds can be read from Facebook accounts, to read their news feed and comment on the status updates of their friends.

The application received 4 out 5 stars in a review on Download.com.⁶ It has also received 4 out of 5 stars in a review on About.com.⁷