Category: rss

“You Have Not Read The Entire Internet”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

My chum Adam recently posted this Tweet [*] which nicely encapsulates my RSS scenario (in addition to his, apparently):

At some point, having an unread count on your RSS reader becomes as useful as an app that says “You have not read the entire internet”.

[*] For those who aren’t aware, “tweets” describe messages on Twitter, “a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘updates’” to their friends.

Indeed, while I don’t think of myself as a pack rat (as I actually find it rather fun to throw things away that I no longer need), I’m starting to realize that I may have tendencies toward information pack-ratting. Fortunately, this is typically harmless; for example, with hard disk storage as cheap as it is these days, there’s little disadvantage to keeping old photos those I’ve taken.

On the other hand, it can be overwhelming to have thousands of unread items in one’s RSS reader. And, now that my taxes are out of the way, this may be a good opportunity to get a handle on that. I’ve only been able to find one article addressing this so far (not that there aren’t more, but I just haven’t found them). Kathy Sierra has an informative entry about The myth of “keeping up”. Much of it is written with an eye toward paper-based media (magazines and the like) but most of the advice is just as applicable toward RSS-based subscriptions as well.

Probably the most significant of her suggestions is to “Unsubscribe to as many things as possible”. If I were being glib, I might be tempted to write that off as being “easier said than done” ;). Kidding aside, while that may be difficult, I think that it may also be the most fruitful of her suggestions. Then again, with the number of feeds to which I subscribe, I feel like I almost need a meta suggestion (or even a rule of thumb) about triaging my feeds to figure out which to delete and which to keep. Meta-suggestion or not, I think I feel reinvigorated toward trimming my feeds.

FeedLounge is Teh R0x0rs

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

My chum Chris Griego recently turned me onto FeedLounge as an alternative to Bloglines. As a user of Bloglines for several years, I was a little skeptical at first, especially since FeedLounge isn’t free (it’s $5/month or $50/year). However, after trying it, I was convinced — I’ve ditched Bloglines in favor of FeedLounge.

FeedLounge, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a web-based RSS reader created Alex King and Scott Sanders. If I were trite, I could say that it’s “Bloglines + Web 2.0” but even typing that sentence makes me wince. In plain English, here're a few of FeedLounge’s advantages:

  • Tags — This one made the most difference to me. Down the left side of the screen are various categories, or, in this case, tags. And, like other tagging applications, items can be assigned any number of tags. So, for instance, I could put A List Apart in both “css” and “xhtml” if I wanted to.

  • Background Updates — Because it's all Ajaxy, most of the interaction requires no explicit server hits. So, as feeds gain entries, those entries just appear and the count next to the feed name is updated. Of course, this is all done without interrupting the rest of the screen; any entries which you may be in the middle of reading remain just where they are.

  • Granular Feed Reading — One of my big gripes with Bloglines was that if you clicked on the feed from the left side of the page, all of the entries from that feed would appear on the right side of the page (and they would all be marked as read). Naturally, that type of interface is available in FeedLounge as well, but there’re others from which to choose as well. The one I use is a 3-pane layout, similar to what you see in many e-mail clients. And, just like an e-mail client, the individual entries are only marked as read as you move from one to the next.

  • Full Keyboard Control — FeedLounge’s documentation summarizes their keyboard support saying that “what you think should work, does” (or words to that effect). And, indeed, that’s pretty much been the case. For example, when viewing entries in the 3-pane view, the up and down arrow keys move from one entry to the next (just as you’d expect).

In all, I’m really pleased with FeedLounge. Were I less convinced, I might have signed up for a month at a time, but I’ve paid through for the year.