I've made stabs at using various RSS applications before, but couldn't really find a free reader that I liked, so I dropped the search and relied on endlessly refreshing my browser tabs.

But Catherine's enthusiasm for Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature has rekindled my interest in RSS, and thanks to the commenters at kevin rose dot com, I've finally found one I like: FeedReader. It's open source, it's free, and it works under any version of Windows. It's worth going into the settings -- by default, sites open within FeedReader instead of your browser, which is kind of a drag. But once you get that ironed out, the app will happily check all your favorite blogs every X minutes and pop up unobtrusive notification windows whenever one of them is updated. You can set the app to start up when your system does and live in your system tray. Overall, a pretty efficient way to be inefficient at work. Hopefully future releases will include a little more customization, and better integration with Firefox -- but for now, I'm pretty satisfied.

Now I just need to bug my friends who don't use RSS to update their sites (for those of you that are interested and use blogspot, you can read here how to add an Atom feed, which most RSS clients can use -- to support those that can't, you can also check out FeedBurner).