
Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the Web.  - peter123
http://www.slate.com/id/2217353/pagenum/all
======
rufo
This system is the entire reason I switched to RSS (first with NetNewsWire,
now Google Reader) in the first place. I found myself wasting an _incredible_
amount of time just reloading a website to see if anything's new, processing
the page, trying to figure out which articles I might have already read, etc.

Now, in Google Reader, I typically use the "all items" feed and blast through
the list, only looking at the headlines. If something interests me, I'll
either hit "s" to star it (meaning read later, not now), read it inline (if
it's a full-text feed) or middle-click it to put it in a tab and read as soon
as I'm done scanning.

If there's under 100 items, it probably only takes me about 5 minutes to go
through them. If there are more, I'll typically load up the most post-heavy
blogs (which I keep in a folder) and speed through them, then switch over to
all feeds and read through them.

My only problem with my current system is that I check Google Reader _way_
more often than I should - but I'm generally fairly happy with how I do it.

~~~
skorgu
<AOL>

This is basically my system. I never hit anything but the all-items feed and
I'm pretty strict about leaving zero unread before I navigate away so I can't
just pop in for a quick read unless I've got at least 15 minutes to kill. I
breeze past most items and middle-click anything interesting that's longer
than a screenful.

The downside is I end up having a _lot_ of open tabs with things I want to
read.

~~~
rufo
I'm _very_ aggressive about starring things.

I only middle-click things that immediately pique my curiosity or that are
time-sensitive. If it's something long or that I can read later, it goes into
the starred bin.

What's wound up happening is that I have (I think - Google doesn't give an
exact count) several thousand starred items in that list that I have yet to
read through. I used to feel pressured about this, but I've recently stopped
worrying about it. If there's something important I want to come back to
later, I can search through it, and if I didn't read it, obviously it can't
have been _that_ important.

------
carbon8
Really, this isn't a hard concept to grasp: RSS is not email. You don't need
to read everything. You don't need to feel overwhelmed. You don't need to feel
guilty. What an RSS reader allows you to do is have a central location to
categorize and read updates from all the sites you want to follow, and you get
the added benefit of knowing what you've already seen. So what if you have
10000+ unread items across all feeds in your aggregator?

~~~
dimitar
I like to disable the read/unread functionality and read only what grabs my
attention.

------
jerf
This sounds exactly like Dave Winer's thoughts on how RSS readers should be
structured, minus the correct solution:
<http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews>

From reading the article, the author was clearly using an email-style
aggregator. I strongly agree with Dave Winer; this may seem like a good idea
at first, but it is grossly at odds with how the human brain works. River-of-
news is the way to go and good keystrokes for scanning is the way to go.
Google Reader is acceptable. (Ironic, since that's the picture used for the
article, but it is clearly not what the author is using. If you look at the
picture, it's what you get with a brand-new signup.)

------
RossM
I've been moving towards using aggregators, such as HN and reddit, as my RSS
readers. I found myself not reading half the items in my blogs, and then
finding the items I _was_ reading in the HN/reddit feeds.

I now only have a few blogs (that don't come up on these aggregators; I only
post links to them if they're relevant/interesting) and some strips I read in
Google Reader and it works much better.

I've found that letting a community decide what I read much more productive
for me (and there's always lists of "unapproved" items available) - you just
have to find a community that seems interested in what you are.

------
jokermatt999
I used to use a similar system as the author. Then I upgraded to RSS. It seems
as if he didn't have good system for RSS, but then found a good system for
bookmarks. I use RSS, but I also use tabs. Instead of reading blogs in Google
Reader, I use j (next item) and s (star to read later) with one hand, and
middle click with the other. I get just the interesting stories, on their
sites, and I can wade through uninteresting stories quicker. I never check a
site redundantly either.

------
doosra
The author says "instead of scouring the Web for interesting stories,
everything came to me!"

I believe the author is confusing the presentation of content with the
filtering. The author went from using a browser, to an RSS reader, back to a
browser. What remains unsolved is the problem of filtering uninteresting
stories.

The real reason his new solution works is because he's manually filtered
stories. But this approach doesn't scale with the number of websites that are
being tracked.

What remains unsolved is an algorithm to find stories that are interesting to
the author.

------
Encosia
There's no reason you can't use a system like that within an RSS reader. I
have a couple dozen priority buckets in Google Reader, used to similar effect.

That way, I can easily declare RSS bankruptcy on spammy, low-value feeds such
as TechCrunch without worrying about missing something important.

------
edw519
Good idea.

8:00 a.m. - Hacker News

9:00 a.m. - Hacker News

10:00 a.m. - Hacker News

11:00 a.m. - Hacker News

oh wait

------
bemmu
While Hacker News is almost the same as I ask, is there a way to filter items
in my RSS feeds by ratings? For example not reading any entries unless other
users have rated them at least 4 stars.

~~~
pclark
check out postrank and their Google Reader plugin

~~~
bemmu
Great, seems to be exactly what I was describing. A bit confusing to join
though, they should work on that.

------
mbrubeck
I use Google Reader for low-volume sources where I want to read every post
(mostly friends' blogs, a few high-quality tech bloggers, work-related stuff),
and a Planet Venus page for high-volume feeds that I don't mind missing
sometimes (Twitter, kottke.org, Daring Fireball, O'Reilly Radar, ...). The
Planet site updates only twice a day (so I don't check it constantly) and only
saves the last 100 posts (so posts don't pile up if I'm away for a couple
days).

------
juneelijah
using a bookmark-based system still has it's advantages. not every site has
RSS. I get the best of both worlds by using Diffbot
[<http://www.diffbot.com>].

------
larryfreeman
Strange article. I started out agreeing that RSS could be better but then when
I heard his response, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Maybe he should start using FriendFeed or iGoogle.

------
windsurfer
Hacker News is my amazing system for browsing the web.

