Every once in awhile, probably once or twice a year, I decide to give a shot at doing my daily website reading via some sort of RSS feed reading system rather than going to the actual websites themselves. It seems like a great idea, and one that would add huge amounts of efficiency.
Every time I’ve done it though, I’ve ended up only doing it for a few days, then giving up. What has happened in the past that stopped me? Well, lets see…
#1) I would subscribe to just too much crap, and end up overwhlemed and unable to keep up. When I go to the websites by hand, I of course miss even more, because I forget to go certain places, etc, etc. And I don’t care. But when I have a feed, and a little number showing how many items I have, I suddenly start caring more.
#2) I get frustrated by feeds which constantly are pushing out stuff I’ve seen before. Either because there are updates, or it is just glitchy, or whatever. When I see something again that I saw before, I get all frustrated. Of course, this also happens going to the websites, just in a different way.
#3) I always end up like I am missing context from the websites themselves. That somehow the rest of the site around the article I am looking for adds something that I just miss by just looking at a feed (and perhaps clicking through on some specific items). Of course, there are some sites where the design is just so awful I don’t go there any more even though I might like the content, so this might be a solution to that.
Anyway, I’m giving it a try again. This all started because I had decided to give Growl another shot on my Mac (plus a number of other little utilities, I sort of went nuts last night) and one of the supported programs was NetNewsWire so I downloaded it and started trying it out. I subscribed to the feeds for all the sites I keep on my blogroll at the left of my website and a few others I’ve been checking out but I haven’t bothered to put there yet. Then I started checking out their synchronization with NewsGator Online since of course ideally when I red my feeds from different places it would all be syncronized. Then I got a little frustrated with that and then I exported the OPML and then pulled it all into Google Reader.
That’s what I’m using at this very moment. I know there are a number of other options, both in terms of desktop clients and web based solutions. I like desktop clients, but syncing between locations is a little tricker in that case usually, especially if you have Mac, Windows and a Treo all in the mix and want it to work in all three places. So web based may be the way to go.
Anybody got any additional suggestions I should try? Or should I stick with Google Reader for a bit. It seems to do a decent job.
