Handling 99 feeds
Something was scratching me a bit for a while, but I couldn't fix it precisely about handling my RSS feeds.
Now, I suscribed to 99 of them, thus there are hundreds of items to read every day, so I *need* to handle them the best way.
Windows
I first used Feedreader on Windows for a long time, but it happened to be a but buggy when I needed to update more than twenty feeds. So I used it on my mainstream feeds, using Firefox bookmarks to browse the other websites' hompages to see what was new. I still do it for Slashdot, since I've never integrated it into any aggregator.Gno'
Then I opened Je Hais Le Printemps, and, as a consequence, the extent of my blogosphere dramatically inflated the amount of feeds I read. And my switch to Ubuntu, made it worse.That's the reason why I switched from a standalone application to another one, and I apt-get installed liferea on gno, removed Feedreader from my Windows desktop and stacked feeds to a total of 80. Roughly.
Why not Firefox?
It's been a long time since RSS feeds are handled in Firefox. RSS Reader project, that became Sage, for instance.But both extensions lacked of usability. The main issue was the item display in the current tab. To be perfect, it would have had an option such as "open content in a new tab". And I would have cheked it immediately. I don't know about current versions, but I gave up installing those extensions for a long time, I won't switch back.
What about live Bookmarks, then? Well, they're nice... If you only need to read one feed at a time!
To update a feed, you need to right-click on the virtual directory in your bookmark toolbar or manager, and press "update". Then the context menu disappears. So you need to click once again to
see the updated content... Just imagine to repeat this on every directory, one by one.
Should I do this on my 80 feeds and counting? Too many clicks.
Thunderbird at work
On the morning, while coffee is warming up, I have to read about fifteen new items that appeared during the night. SO, after the setup of Thundebird 1.0, I configured a "RSS and News" account, and subscribed to ten - twelve essential feeds, those I would read absolutely during the day.Here is my problem: I read items at the office during the morning. At noon, I power up my gno, and I get them again in Liferea... Not to mention the items I read during the evening/night on gno, I have them back on Thunderbird the day after.
An unpleasant impression of "déjà-vu". Feel like I'm wasting my time, re-running the same mental filter process, sometimes skipping an important item while clicking too fast on "mark posts read" button.
Online aggregators
So I opened a Bloglines account.Bloglines is a web aggregator.
It's almost the alike any webmail ; it's available from anywhere, at work or at home, at a friend's home. Thus, the online aggregator handles the feed update, so you don't have to press the "refresh" button from time to time to get the feeds up-to-date.
Nice feature: when you have 80 feeds in your RSS aggregator, you *must* be lazy, instead of adding all of them one by one, by hand. Praise to this XML-based format called
Language">OPML, that allows you to import/export from an application to another. A lot of time saved.
Random rant:
still doesn't support OPML in its official releases.
You need a patch to be able to use it.
Much more important rant: Bloglines interface is dumb. When I click on the title of a directory, it's marked as "read". One click after, it's gone. In my opinion, the change of "read" status of an item must be an action rather than just "click to browse" link. Underlined text is known world-widely as "just browse". If you want to perform a process, it must be explicitely written, such as "mark as read".
Huge lack of usability.
The right choice: Newsgator
Then I switched to NewGator, four days ago. It looks like it's perfect. Nice interface, simple organisation, user-friendly functions.
I didn't remove Liferea from my laptop yet, but if it keeps on like this, I surely will.
What's next? Find my 100th feed