Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#21

Post by makecheck » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 5:52 PM UTC

At home, I use my web browser (OmniWeb) to put menus of feed items into my toolbar. This is good because I tend to be in my browser when viewing other news sites.

Yet at work, I use my E-mail (Thunderbird), perhaps because the RSS feeds tend to be blogs, newsgroups or other similar E-mail-like items.

In other words, my reader depends on the style of the content: is it E-mail-like, or web-like.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#22

Post by mbleigh » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 5:53 PM UTC

I use Google Reader, currently subscribed to 68 feeds and get around 250-300 posts per day. I read everything in expanded mode, though most of the time I'll just skim a headline and move on.

I have my feeds logically grouped into prioritized groups so that if I start to get a backlog of 500+ posts I will read my favorite blog from a given category then mark all as read to reduce the counts.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#23

Post by pchristensen » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 6:01 PM UTC

I use Google Reader to read about 200 feeds. But I've ruthlessly pruned anyone that

a) took too much absolute time (high volume, long posts - ie big news sites without targeted content)

b) too low signal to noise ratio (typically from someone that writes one popular posts that's a little outside their main topics) - Stuff White People like was on this - funny, not that funny, repetitive, too often. If it was once a week, I would have read it.

I read (see) probably 50 posts a day - anything more than that and I go back and prune some. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a day reading. It's my equivalent of watching TV. Here are the main categories:

Must reads - the Yegges, Grahams, Mosers, etc

High volume, quick reads - FAIL blog, Seth Godin

High volume, useful but not always great - SvN, CodingHorror, Joel

Low volume - product blogs, occasional bloggers

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#24

Post by mickt » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 6:10 PM UTC

Sage a Firefox plugin, and sometimes Google Reader.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#25

Post by darose » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 6:24 PM UTC

Bloglines.

129.

Read the most important ones, then eventually catch up on the other ones.

I'd go mad if I didn't read them selectively like this.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#26

Post by tc7 » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 6:27 PM UTC

I use Opera's built-in feed reader. I like it. I have about 20 feeds subscribed, and I obsessively at least skim every article until it tells me there are zero unread.

Quite a pain on Monday (I don't read feeds on weekends) to come into work and have 50 new articles on Business of Software and Hacker News :P. Just one of those burdens I bear, I guess. I used to actually click through and read each and every HackerNews article, so I've improved somewhat from there. Little baby steps.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#27

Post by silentbicycle » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 6:48 PM UTC

I use Planet ( http://www.planetplanet.org/ ), and only update it once a day, because Y HN is distracting enough!

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#28

Post by hbien » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 7:08 PM UTC

I use NewsFire, subscribed to about 50-60 feeds. I skim through them (hit space) and if anything catches my eye I read them. If I'm not in the mood to read it, I flag it for later reading.

Every month or so I go through my feeds and only keep the ones that consistently have posts that catch my attention.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#29

Post by antiform » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 7:18 PM UTC

I'm subscribed to only about 15 feeds through Google Reader, which I refine every season according to signal/noise ratio. I'm also a big fan of Google Alerts, which I've found is a good way to find great articles that you wouldn't find in the echo chamber of most blogs, particularly those about programming.

Otherwise, I check HN and a couple other news sites. Most of the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and Google Alerts catches the good articles that don't get on the front page.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

#30

Post by paulgb » Thu, Jul 17, 2008, 7:29 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #16

By not having a RSS reader, I can lie to myself and say that I'm not that addicted to technology news/blogs. By not having sites bookmarked, it makes me put a little effort into visiting sites like MacRumors, techmeme, etc.

Agreed. I deleted all my RSS subscriptions a few months back and haven't looked back. I don't get how people can follow hundreds or even dozens of RSS subscriptions and still have time to work on their startup.