I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that. Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than eno…
Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs. I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use rss.
> If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed. If you find yourself hitting “Mark all as read” more than a couple of times for any feed, delete that feed. You won’t miss anything important.
Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).
I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that. Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than eno…
> and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting
Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples: 1. Following a user on reddit via rss: http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss 2. Following a search term on reddit via rss: http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig 3. Checking a m…
5. Blog comments, especially for threads that go like this: "I also have this problem" (2010), "Me too" (2011), "Me too" (2012), "Ah, here's the solution (2013)
This exactly matches my use case for RSS. High volume daily websites - like HN - I read directly. I went through a phase where I tried to read HN via RSS (in Google Reader) and for me it wasn't better than just hitting HN directly. But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pa…
Could not agree more, this is the exact use case for the 'power users' of RSS. And he is right that without RSS I don't know how these low-posting-frequency sites would keep their readership. If I had to give up one, I'd give up twitter or hackernews long before that low-frequency RSS feed. Those posts are gold and for niche subjects (I'm into bio) there is no where else they are aggregated.
Tech, video games, etc.. journalists have a very different use case for RSS, which is exactly using it to monitor dozens of other information sources (including their competitors). I think they match the definition of power users, perhaps more than you and I, because that's the primary tool for their job : they will routinely have hundreds of RSS feeds and will skim quickly through thousands of items a day to look for the information that they haven't treated yet.
RSS is perfect for that matter and it is precisely the opposite of what marco and you claim is a poor usage of RSS.
So he advocates never subscribing to high frequency feeds because most clients show the contents of all feeds in one big list.
I find that is the wrong way to adress the problem. A more useful solution seems to be a different way to structure an rss reader. Opera for example incorporates one that works alongside its email client. It fixes the issue by treating individual feeds as email folders which can be structured inside more folders and highlighting folders with unread contents as well as displaying their content counts.
This screenshow should demonstrate usefully how easy this makes it to notice new updates on low-frequency feeds while still allowing skimming of high-frequency ones without one interrupting the other:
Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples: 1. Following a user on reddit via rss: http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss 2. Following a search term on reddit via rss: http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig 3. Checking a m…
5. Blog comments, especially for threads that go like this: "I also have this problem" (2010), "Me too" (2011), "Me too" (2012), "Ah, here's the solution (2013)
"Please send me the codes? sandeep_31285@yahoo.co.in" (2012 a, b, c, d)
Exactly! Also the fact that rss enables this kind high quality, narrow domain, low volumes posting makes the web way better. I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of…
We have been working on developing RSS reader since last 8 months. We felt google reader is not for everyone and we wanted our rss reader to be used by anyone... who may not understand RSS. While implementing the RSS reader, we have learnt a lot and one of them being the power of RSS. I hope what we are building helps a lot of people. Check out http://multiplx.com
> So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period Oh, I really like that idea. how do you set up that feed?
Reddit already produces the top items feeds, so that's easy. For example, the weekly top proggit feed is http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top/.rss?sort=top&t=... You just add .rss to the url you get when browsing, before the args. Then I used yahoo pipes to extract the top 3 items from that feed. I take the output of the yahoo pipe as input for my RSS reader, which collapses duplicates. I used google reader, so I…
