Bizz RSS Feed Liner for Windows

There's a lot to like with this freeware feed reader/ticker, but it suffers from a couple of bad programming choices. Bizz RSS Feed Liner's interface is split among a feed manager, feed ticker, and an options box. A single option set would be preferable, but most users will have little trouble finding settings.

We were more disappointed by the extra steps needed to remove prepopulated feed categories. The program uses the tree model to lists feeds; which might lead users to expect they could delete all subfolders of a category with a single click. Instead, you must first delete each of the categories feeds, then remove the subcategories, then the full categories.

Cleaning out the categories and feeds is just the first step for new Bizz RSS Feed Liner users, but adding feeds and customizing the program is quick and simple. Click a button, type in the URL, and the program automatically discovers available feeds. With a click you can choose to display select feeds in the program's Feed Ticker; a scrolling headline display that is the feed reader's best feature. You can easily set the ticker to display items in time or feed order, speed up or slow down the crawl speed, and display or hide read items. Unfortunately, you can't set the items to open in your default browser. The program is hard-coded to open items in the publisher's Internet Explorer-based browser. We found that browser less robust than Firefox, or the latest IE, as many pages suffered from script errors.

Bizz RSS Feed Liner also had trouble loading test feeds with unusual URLs, although the feeds were RSS 2.0 standard. Minor problems aside, this easily customizable freeware reader deserves a place on the desktop of any busy user.