Lamenting over the death of Google Reader was a favorite past time for me – but I have moved on to discovering great alternatives that can deliver great services without the additional cost. Luckily, the makers of Reeder are making their iPad and Mac app available for free.

You’ll still have to pay $2.99 for the iPhone app, but the iPad version would have cost $4.99 prior to today. Reeder’s announcement suggested that the app will only be free until its next update:

Reeder for Mac and iPad will be updated to 2.0 in the coming months. Version 2.0 will add all the features of the iPhone version, including all sharing and syncing services. Until then, Reeder for Mac and Reeder for iPad will be free, starting today.

I just got an email this morning from Nikola Tepper, the developer of kindly.cz. He’s was writing to ask for permission to convert the feed from my blog, The Digital Reader, so he could offer it for download from his site.

I thought it a little absurd that he should ask, but I can understand why he did it. About a month ago Zite received a cease and desist letter signed by a large number of publishers. Zite has been pulling web content from many news sites so that it could show that content in its iPad app, and that’s fairly similar to what Nikola wanted to do with my blog (although on a vastly larger scale).

Aside from asking permission this is a fairly ordinary feed conversion service. It’s still in beta, and the selection is limited. It’s also supported primarily in Czech, which might discourage most users. But if that’s not a hindrance, by all means, check it out.

kindly.cz

As you may know, not all blogs offer the full text of a post in their RSS feeds. As frustrating as that must be, some blogs do it because they want you to visit the website.

A new website launched recently that intends to help you avoid the frustration. Fulltextrssfeed.com will take any RSS feed that you give it and it will create a new feed made from the complete articles.

Here’s an example feed drawn from the blog of one of eBookNewser’s competitor, The Bookseller. As you can see, this new feed replaces the partial posts that The Bookseller was providing before with the full text of the article.

example

Fulltextrssfeed.com