Sure enough, just after I ranted yesterday about not being able to find a mobile RSS reader, I found a better solution in terms of conserving cellphone/wifi bandwidth: downloading webpages and RSS feeds to your desktop/ laptop, converting them to an OpenSource format, then offloading to your PDA or smartphone. No costly cellular data bandwidth required. [NOTE: Plucker currently only works on PalmOS-based devices.]

What I installed is a combination of two packages: Plucker and Sunrise. Plucker is both an offline reader and mobile file format, and has a desktop aggregator. You can convert a variety of file formats (text, HTML, RDF, PDF, etc) into Plucker and use your PDA's Plucker Viewer to read them.

If you want to pickup mobile editions of your favourite websites, download the Plucker Desktop (supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X). Plucker Desktop can be configured to check sites on a schedule. It can also convert one of the aforementioned file formats into Plucker format, for offloading to your PDA. When it's finished, you can hotsync to your PDA. (Although there doesn't seem to be any menu option to trigger this from Plucker Desktop.)

What Plucker Desktop can't do yet is pick up RSS feeds. However, that's something Sunrise Desktop can do (amongst other things). Use Sunrise to pick up your favourite webfeed headlines (and web pages). It'll automatically convert them to the open source Plucker format. You can then hotsync to your PDA and read the "document" in Plucker Viewer. (Although as with Plucker Desktop, there's no menu option to activate the hotsync. You'll have to do it from your PDA or its cradle.)

Just some words of caution: Don't keep updating the same channels over and over all day long or you may find your IP address banned.

Now it just so happens that FlipTheDolphin already wrote about combining Plucker and Sunrise several months ago. He also has some screen captures in his article. However, his description about using Sunrise was for an earlier version, so some of the instructions are slightly outdated.

Note: There is also AvantGo, but their signup form is extremely nosy and will not continue unless you specify several personal bits of info including yearly income. What that info has to do with using a mobile RSS reader I don't know.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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