

Sane RSS usage - sjs
http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage

======
petercooper
_What Jacqui did in RSS’ absence is always helpful: letting other people
filter popular news sites for you._

I've been hearing this back from a lot of my subscribers (I run weekly
JavaScript, Ruby, and HTML5 newsletters). They've gotten sick of the deluge
that accompanies RSS feeds and the lack of discrimination that sometimes
occurs on Twitter and they trust me to curate that info for them. Of course,
the next step is to expand into some slightly bigger niches ;-)

Of course, there's the "why aren't you doing this with RSS" crowd too, but
with 25k subscribers and growing, I'm finding it pays to focus on those who
actually want the e-mails!

~~~
cluboholic
I'm a subscriber to your javascript and html5 newsletters and I must admit
you're doing a great job. every week i get the best of the news, carefully
picked with short descriptions so I don't have to look any further if
something doesn't interest me. i wished there was newsletters like yours for
more of the topics that interest me!

thanks!

~~~
petercooper
I'm always open to suggestions! :-) There are a couple more on the way but
it's reached a bit of a "crunch" time where I decide if there's a business in
it or not. Interesting times.

~~~
vijaydev
Didn't know there was a HTML5 weekly too. Subscribed.

Already subscribed to Ruby and JS and absolutely love them. Thanks for the
great job!

------
conesus
I mentioned this to Marco and it's why I built NewsBlur,
<http://www.newsblur.com>, specifically for folks like me who follow a few
dozen (even a hundred or more) blogs written by a single author. You want to
engage with that author on their terms, which means their site. Not stripped
away in an RSS feed reader with no context.

I built an Original view to solve this very issue. It's solving the crux of
the RSS problem for people like this. You want to follow dozens of writers but
you also want to go to their site. But since they may be infrequent, RSS is
the only decent answer. NewsBlur's Original view couples the benefit of RSS
with the writer's artistic intention in site design and flow.

I also added a trainable intelligence filter to hide stories from those
constant-stream multiple-author blogs.

I use the intelligence filters to read the Hacker News firehose and only see
stories with [`python`, `javascript`, `ask hn`, `poll`] in their titles.

~~~
voidfiles
Doesn't the fitter remove serendipity from the feed reading process. Machine
learning algos can't ever replace human editing. The messiness of feeds if
managed correctly will often surprise you with things you wouldn't have
otherwise read.

~~~
conesus
I actually only use machine learning to present options for you to filter or
highlight. Everything is explicit, which means you know exactly what you're
missing and what's getting highlighted. (I refer to filter and highlight, but
NewsBlur uses a traffic light of unread stories -- red is filtered, yellow is
neither, and green is highlighted. You just flip between those three unread
states with a slider control.)

------
carbon8
Personally, I use RSS in Google Reader as a living bookmark system. I have
about 500 subscriptions and don't pay any attention to the unread count. A
couple times a week when I'm in the mood to check out stuff in a certain
subject area, I'll go on google reader and click through things in that
folder. For instance, if I'm looking for inspiration, I'll click through my
"art and design" folder that has 50 to 100 feeds in it. Other times some
business event will be in the news, and I'll go into my folder of business
feeds.

Apparently using RSS in this way is somehow different than how most people use
it. People complain about feeling guilty or somehow stressed out by unread
counts. People complain about a psychological pressure to keep up with and
read everything in a feed or collection of feeds.

However, I'm left wondering whether this is an issue with how the tools are
designed, or perhaps with how RSS is framed. Perhaps we need to develop tools
that deemphasize unread counts and instead further emphasize browsing or
discontinuous digestion of the content streams.

~~~
voidfiles
For a time I thought topic based folders was the best approach, but over time
I figured out that sorting folders in an 1 - 10 fashion, 1 being all the sites
I really care about to 10 sites I would read if I have the time. By triaging
my feeds like this I know then I can read the most important pieces in a very
short amount of time. I don feel bad at all about emptying out the otter
folders.

~~~
stock_toaster
This seems like a great way to do things. Currently I have topical folders,
and it isn't very optimized. I have things that I want to read (a few people's
blogs, tech, security news, etc), and things that I might like to read (e.g.
book reviews), and things that might be funny or a pleasant distraction (e.g.
cat pictures) all mixed in together.

Moving to a priority model where folders are listed in order of general
importance to me, sounds like a real improvement -- the ability to nuke lower
priority folders without concern.

Thanks for the idea.

------
a3_nm
I am a fond user of RSS for the "large number of infrequently updated sites"
use case, but I am still subscribed to some high-volume news sources. Relying
on your friends to read them for you is good, but obviously not sustainable
(if everyone did that...). I'm toying with the idea of doing naive Bayes
filtering on my feeds to filter out the mass of stuff I'm not interested in.

~~~
gwern
> I'm toying with the idea of doing naive Bayes filtering on my feeds to
> filter out the mass of stuff I'm not interested in.

Some readers already have some machine learning stuff built in, like Google
Reader's 'sort by magic' feature. (It works OK, not great.)

------
LeafStorm
One thing that I use RSS for (well, I did before I switched
computers...nothing really like Liferea for Mac) is reading webcomics.
Irregular Webcomic, Darths & Droids, and The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, all in
one place. (I would have done Freefall as well, but there's not an RSS feed
for it.)

~~~
mdaniel
You may find <http://www.diffbot.com/> handy for Freefall.

I have not played with it a lot, but its claim to fame seems to fit your need.

------
notyourwork
Relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959299>

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trustfundbaby
I think its just a case of user organization/finding good sources ... I was
subscribed to techcrunch/engadget etc but I found that because of the high
volume of stuff they pump out that I didn't read them at all ... so I got rid
of all of them and started using the HN top 20/50 RSS feed that someone made a
few weeks ago.

I also have my feeds organized into folders, so that the more frequently
updating but news worthy stuff is in one folder and the others are other
places ... depending on the time I have I go through them in a particular
order and it works very well.

But yes, the truth is that sites that create RSS feeds need to be a bit more
picky about what they publish ... especialy since they practice that same self
restraint in publishing things to facebook, if they have a presence there

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gasull
In my previous post I explain how to filter any RSS feed so you get only the
most popular posts from the feed, thus making it "infrequently updated":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959643>

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davidwparker
I love RSS and subscribe to about 150 sites or so. I do two things that make
it a lot easier though. First, I have a "Read" folder/tag for blogs that I
_need_ to read. There are probably ~5 blogs in there total. Second, I have a
'Mread' as in "Mark as read" folder for things that I don't need to read at
all, but are available for a quick search as they contain useful information.
Between these two I hardly feel like I need to read a ton, but I still get
great usage out of RSS.

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cmsj
what the hell is with all these people telling me that I'm doing something
wrong with RSS?! I think I'll feel free to consume things in any way I find
relevant to my interests. If that means I want a firehose of updates, so be
it. If that means I want to only read 6 new things a day like Marco, so be it.
It will be my choice and my balance, not his or anyone else's.

~~~
pauljonas
Everybody thinks everyone else uses the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RSS just like
they do.

Everybody believes that everyone else should use the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
RSS in the way they do it.

Granted, most RSS reader applications get RSS horribly wrong, and erroneously
graft the email “inbox” pattern as the UI focus, instead of a river to be
skimmed (with power to dive in deep, too). Google Reader is the best in a
sorry lot, but mainly because Google sports an inherent advantage (even in the
foolhardy sense they’ve implemented it thus far) with its ominous search
capability. Read and unread item counts matter not a scintilla to me, as I
care just for nimbleness in scanning “what’s new” in the subject matters of my
choosing in a chronological manner.

I enjoy reading RSS on Google Reader. It has totally supplanted the time I
used to allot to “reading the newspaper”. I know I’ve shared this before, but
I keep pace with 2,600 subscriptions. No, I certainly do not read every item
and probably only click through less than 10-20% of items. Not true for all
sites, as the frequently updated sites get clicked at a 2-3% rate whereas
treasured, infrequently updated sites have all their items read. But I don’t
fret over unread items and even if I miss reading for a day or two, I feel no
obligation to “catch up”, and instead, if I want to review items of interest I
may have missed, I use the “Search” feature.

Oh, additionally, all of the mobile and/or tablet RSS reader applications are
colossal failures, except for maybe Flipboard, which comes at RSS in a
different tact, mainly via Twitter. The whole point of RSS is accelerating the
pace at which web content is perused. Doing RSS with a subscription set count
of less than a hundred is not much of an efficiency improvement. And the
mobile and/or tablet offerings simply choke and sputter on a larger dataset
(unless there are new, or updated, offerings I am unaware of). Also, Google
Reader (as well as all the Google web products) suck massively on the mobile
platforms — it’s why my iPad mostly collects dust and the MacBook Air (using
Chrome/Chromium in full screen mode) shines — for the superior Google Reader
experience.

~~~
cmsj
I find a very great deal of agreement in what you have said here. A good
example of one of my firehose feeds is HackerNews. I don't actually know what
proportion of the posts I read, but I would guess it's significantly less than
10%. Sure I'm wasting some time scrolling away most of the headlines, but
since one of the primary functions of a human brain is to discard irrelevant
inputs, I'm able to do this pretty quickly. The reward is that I get to read
articles that I would never otherwise have seen if I just followed 6 people I
already agree with.

------
rektide
I see very little reason I shouldn't do everything in RSS. I agree with Marco
that this presents a danger of being committed to too much, of being afraid to
trash things; the solution is to clearly isolate in your feed reader the feeds
you do, and do not expect to fully read.

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dchuk
My Labor Day side project is basically Reddit style voting and commenting +
RSS Feed aggregation, in the interest of solving basically this same problem.

I'm hoping to have it on the server by tonight, I will submit it here tomorrow
for you guys to beat up and critique :)

------
synnik
I use RSS primarily on intranets, to help the guys in the field, who spend
maybe 10 minutes a day in front of a computer, keep up on what is going on in
our industry. I control which feeds are displayed - they just need to open a
browser and read the news page.

------
orionlogic
RSS become my bookmarks folder in the cloud.

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jamespo
lifehacker gets lots of posts a day, I really need to filter that

~~~
dekz
Doesn't it also publish only a summary instead of the full article? If I see a
site like that in my feed it quickly gets removed.

I'm not saying I'm particularly against driving hits to a website to show ads
(although I really am), but to me it defies the purpose of RSS feeds.
(Opinion)

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rsanchez1
The author suggests you just browse the site manually...

Why do that when you can use an RSS reader that will only lists the articles?
Instead of memorizing where the articles are on each website, just use RSS
when you want to browse manually.

------
cluboholic
i read hackernews via rss.. hundreds of posts per day - i simply don't go
through all of them. whenever there's nothing interesting to read, i open it
up and check what titles are interesting and start reading

~~~
mgurlitz
The way I catch up with HN posts after a few days away is hckr news
(<http://hckrnews.com/>). It's stress free, and I can shorten the list to 10
or 20 top items per day. Then if I have time I'll expand to the top 50% list
and scan for anything interesting.

~~~
trevorturk
<http://hckrnews.com/> is an awesome way to keep up with hacker news without
missing things if you take a few days off.

