RSS feeds have been around since Netscape was still a thing -- nearly 14 years since its official release candidate -- and they've managed to retain their relevance as the web has grown exponentially. The objective of an RSS feed is simply to pool articles from multiple desirable sources in one place, reducing the amount of websites you'd need to individually visit in favor of one content aggregator; the source for an individual feed can be a certain author, making it easy to stalk them across the web, a website, a forum, or even a photo gallery. The use of RSS as a framework itself has largely become irrelevant as web applications have become more intelligent in their interpretation of content, but feed reading and content aggregation is as alive as ever.

Until recently, Google Reader has made up a large portion of the userbase for feed aggregation, but the company announced just yesterday that they'd be shutting down the service officially on July 1st, 2013. The shutdown means many users are looking for web-based and desktop RSS alternatives to Google Reader -- this article showcases a few of those.

We'll start with two of the rising stars in the web space, then move to a simple desktop reader.

Assembling the actual hardware is easy, as our PC build guides have proven, but the most time-consuming part of the entire DIY process is software configuration. First, you have to download a reasonable web browser. Once that's done, you have to download all the other programs you regularly use, install them, and so on - which can easily take hours when factoring in download times and the occasional smash-head-against-wall breaks.

Disabling the predefined Windows power saving features is one of the first things we do when preparing systems for exhaustive benchmarking (a process we detailed extensively here), and I'd imagine that many users -- likely annoyed by the low default sleep times -- do the same. As the tendency to leave gaming rigs online 24/7 for months at a time increases, power bills, wasted energy, and hardware degradation also increase significantly.

No matter how fancy the locking pattern, phones will still get lost or stolen; luckily, a number of built-in and third-party applications and components, when used in conjunction, create a much more formidable opponent for every day 'hackers' and phone thieves, hopefully being the difference between identity theft and mere hardware theft.