Ad Blocking in Vienna RSS Reader

I gave up NetNewsWire because of its ad-bombardment. Sure, I understand that free software can be expensive for the developer, but there's a limit of ad-bombardment that a user can tolerate. My threshold is very low.

Newsfeeds such as Slashdot have large and annoying graphical ad banners inserted in the RSS XML content. The size of the ads is larger than the 2-3 lines of content. This had to end.

Fortunately, the Vienna RSS reader supports customizable templates. My solution involves disabling the display of these ads using CSS. Follow these simple and easy steps to suppress the display of advertisements in your RSS feeds.

1. Edit /Applications/Vienna.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Styles/Default.viennastyle/template.html
2. Insert the following lines at the top (before the first <div> tag):
   
<style type="text/css">
@import url("http://adblock.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.css");
@import url("http://www.floppymoose.com/userContent.css");
</style>

   
3. Save template.html and restart Vienna RSS.

I use the following two CSS files:

http://adblock.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.css
http://www.floppymoose.com/userContent.css

If anyone comes across a frequently updated CSS stylesheet for adblocking, please let me know. It is easy to add it to "template.html" as shown above.

Quest for a good RSS Reader

I have always been searching for a good RSS reader for the Mac. My criteria for selection:

• Free
• Offline content
  
• No sign-ups, no logins
  
• I don't want Google to learn about what I'm reading
• Good looks
• No annoying ads

For the longest time, NetNewsWire's free version fit my needs. Recently, NNW has become annoying. Overlaid ads, greed and excessively frequent changes and updates (there's almost one every week) killed NNW's appeal. I don't care for Google Reader integration. I don't care for Google Reader, period.

I then switched over to NewsFire. It looks great. It is simple. But it lacked in many features. What killed NewsFire for me was its inability to pull in older content, even if it is on the site's feed. And there are no advanced settings.

NewsFire gave way to Vienna. I still prefer the fonts and styling of NNW and NewsFire, but Vienna does a very good job in meeting my criteria and keeping the ad banners away.