Feed the Love, Love the Feed
I’ve been playing around with RSS readers.
[If you are wondering what the hell I'm talking about, check out Amy Gahran's What Are Webfeeds (RSS), and Why Should You Care?]
On my Mac, I installed Shrook, NewsFire, and the juice one, PulpFiction.
I’m being brutally unfair here, but I had a visceral reaction to the green highlighting on one of the PulpFiction screens, and I just thought, “no.” For all I know it is a preference I could change easily. I don’t even dislike green. The other thing about it was that it did look like it would function just like the mail program. (It was a selling point.) Thing is, I have it in my head that I’m reading RSS feeds, not emailing, so I want it to look different. I don’t want it to be mail.
I had tried out a version of NetNewsWire a little while back, and I don’t know if it was me not ready to really pay attention to RSS or what, but it didn’t stick. This has got me to wondering at what point spending even minimal time investigating new software to facilitate a new way of doing things is worth it. The tipping point for me with RSS was a combination of getting sick of clicking on blogs on my links page to see if they were updates — and on this fateful day, most of them weren’t — and realizing I need to monitor more information channels than was really practical with a links page.
Many of those channels I also need to monitor for work-related purposes. At work, I’m in PC-land, so I’m trying out FeedDemon.
So far, this is what I’ve learned:
- I appreciate sites that give their full feed. I hadn’t looked at my own feed before, and they were excerpts. So as not to be a hypocrit, and because I’m paying attention now, all the froggy goodness is available as a feed.
- Checking for updated feeds saves time. Really. Enough time to make the dead simple installations and minor configuration needed to get going worth it.
- I still want to see actual websites, and I like the readers that make this easy to do.
- I want favicons for my own feeds; I like the ones that have them that display in Shrook.
- Macs rule. Okay, technically I didn’t just learn this, I just thought I’d take this opportunity to reinforce that point. You know, in case anyone on the planet was still wondering which side I am on in the holy war.
I have some concern I’ll wind up creating an electronic unread pile instead of a more efficient way to scan information, but I think I’ll work through that.
What do I like best so far? Even though NewsFire is the most beautiful looking, and Shrook unexpectedly quit twice when I started using it, the early favorite is Shrook. Third time launching seemed to be the charm — it has been stable since the early quits — and interface is intuitive. I like the grouping of info channels, and the ease of going to the source website. I haven’t really dug into all the features yet, so my opinions might change.
I wish I hadn’t waited so long to investigate RSS. Playing around with feed readers has resulted in some forehead-slapping on my part, as in, of course this is the best thing since insert something way cooler than sliced bread here. If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, follow some of those links and get started. You keeping waiting, and your own D’oh! moment of getting it will only be more painful.
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