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.
Of course, doing this reminds me that my own feed looks like ass, with no paragraph breaks and such. There has to be a way for me to fix that without completely upgrading my outdated blog software and migrating to something more modern.
(Which I know I will probably eventually want to do, but which will also probably be a major pain so I’ll probably delay it as long as possible.)
OK, a little digging around in the pMachine code and I think I fixed the line feed thing. Good.
I’ve messed around with a few readers, it’s pretty clear that any client based solution isn’t going to work if you have more than one computer… I’ve tried using web-based ones that you’d setup on your webserver they also suck :( I’ve started using google-reader as well I think my only complaint is that reader.google seems to always want to be ‘offline’ in Safari, I think I’ll open a bug on that if there’s not some easy to see option :)
Note that there is a reader widget for igoogle, which is sort of nice, but also a bit annoying, I’m not a huge fan of it yet.
I switched to Google Reader a few weeks ago from NetNewsWire.
Generally, I really like NetNewsWire, and sticking with Google Reader is often tough. With the NewsGator syncing, it can actually work quite well from multiple computers, which is why I stuck with it so long. I have NetNewsWire on my iMac at work and on my MacBook Pro. On a computer lab machine at school, I can use NewsGator Online. If I had a Windows box I used regularly, I could add FeedDemon to my collection. Unfortunately, the weak spot was the NewsGator sync, which while generally effective, often suffered from horrible slowdowns or lack of access. During those failure periods, it would often start marking old, read content as unread, which was irritating.
And so I’m at Google Reader. I really wanted to be able to do more with shared items, but it won’t let me tag them; I’d have to have separate feeds for each of my tags. It’s very painful to integrate with del.icio.us. The offline mode with Google Gears is half-baked at best. I don’t want to have to remember to tell an application I’m going offline; I want it just to work offline (which is what NetNewsWire does.) Then there’s the whole Google-Reader-Can’t-Do-Authenticated-Feeds problem.
Unfortunately, I think feed readers are just like mail clients. They all suck. And like mutt, you just hope to find one that sucks less. Regardless of how badly they suck, there’s no way I could go back to visiting web pages everyday.
Still liking Google Reader. Of course, as predicted, I am spending too much time looking at it. :-)
By the way, I haven’t had any problems with Safari. I am using the Safari 3 beta though rather than the last fully released Safari 2.
Yea, I’m using the safari beta as well, I like the new search/find stuff in safari 3beta. It’s still doing the ‘offline’ crap to me :(
That has yet to happen to me.