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We have a new toy today, for all LGF readers to play with: a shiny new RSS feed reader. And there’s a button at the top of the right sidebar that will take you there.

This new page takes the place of the RSS feeds widget that’s been in our left sidebar for a long time, and it has some major advantages; you can now see a whole page worth of news items for each feed in the list, and if there are images included in the feed you’ll see those as well.

If you click the text that says “RSS feeds” on the top line, the page will reload; and every time you reload the page it randomly chooses one of the feeds to display. Feeds are cached for 30 minutes, but if you want to make sure you’re looking at the most current version of a feed you can hit the “Reload” button.

The code uses some Javascript magic to automatically reflow the feed items if you resize the window, fitting as many as possible within the window’s current viewport. (I spent more time than I’ll ever admit resizing the window over and over this afternoon just to see the cool animation effect as the news items shuffle around for the best fit.)

Right now, there’s a preset list of several dozen popular news sites and blogs to choose from, but possible future enhancements include allowing registered users to set up their own list of feeds.

Enjoy! (And be informed.)