Documentation
Reference material for RSS Bandit’s desktop app — how to get set up, common questions, and a few things about the software that weren’t always obvious.
From the archive
Consolidated from the original project documentation, which lived across several separate pages.
Browser security settings
RSS Bandit used an embedded Internet Explorer control to render feed items and web pages inside the app. Because of that, some content could get blocked by Internet Explorer’s own security zone settings rather than anything in RSS Bandit itself — adjusting those settings, or adding a site to your trusted zone, was the usual fix if embedded content wasn’t displaying correctly.
Posting comments
For blogs that supported it, comments could be posted directly from the reading pane instead of opening the site in a browser — RSS Bandit submitted the comment through the blog’s own comment API and displayed it back in the thread once posted.
Keyboard shortcuts
Like most desktop feed readers of its era, RSS Bandit relied on keyboard shortcuts for the things you’d do most often — moving between items, marking things read, and flagging items for follow-up — without needing to reach for the mouse.
Building and using plugins
RSS Bandit supported a plugin model, letting developers extend the app beyond what shipped by default — the kind of extensibility that let a small open-source project keep pace with feature requests its core team didn’t have time to build themselves.
Running as a portable application
RSS Bandit could also run as a portable app — installed to a USB drive rather than a machine, so subscriptions and settings could move between computers without a full install each time.
Using RSS Bandit from multiple computers
Covered in more depth on the Features page — subscriptions and read/unread state could be kept in sync between machines via NewsGator Online, or via WebDAV, FTP, or a shared file for a full state sync between, say, a home and work computer.
Several of these pages were linked to over the years by Phil Haack‘s developer blog, haacked.com — Haack was a Microsoft Program Manager on ASP.NET MVC and NuGet before leading client apps at GitHub.
RSS Bandit was released as open source in 2010. The code is still on GitHub.