Getting a grip on RSS
While I like to think I’m ahead of the curve on Internet trends and memes, in terms of actual adoption – I can be quite the luddite.
And so it is that despite the fact that I read a number of blogs (( But I haven’t updated my blogroll to reflect that, sadly )) and tech news sites that publish tons of RSS feeds, I generally visited these sites the old fashioned way – bookmarks in a browser.
But that all changed a while back and I’m reading most of my news via RSS now. What changed?
Social pressure is the answer – In other words, I did not care much about knowing everything that happened in the world of news, but I certainly was interested in knowing whenever my friends updated thier flickr photostreams.
As my contacts list in Flickr grew, the “Photos from my contacts” page in Flickr grew more and more unwieldy – people who posted 20+ photos a day would swamp those who posted maybe 1 photo a day.. and I wanted to keep track of both.
I’ve been on an RSS-heavy diet for about 3 weeks now and I can appreciate why it has become popular, but as always there are some gotchas:
- How to read the feeds? –
There are quite literally “n” number of feed-readers out there and the short answer for that question typically is “Google Reader”. But what I really wanted to avoid was leaving a browser running to catch up on feeds, because that way lies the hell of “zero-productivity”. At the same time, I also appreciated having the ability not just to take my feeds with me wherever I went, but more importantly, knowing where I had left off.
Feeddemon fits the bill very nicely – an acclaimed feed reader with tight online integration (via NewsGator), but I wasn’t ready to put down some cash for a feed-reader (yet).
Some intensive googling lead me to find GreatNews (( More thoughts on GreatNews in an upcoming post )) – a free offline news reader. The reason I chose this is because the product road-map included integration with Google Reader. It hasn’t happened (yet) but the steady pace at which the author is pushing out updates for the reader gives me hope.
- It’s okay to close your feed-reader
Initially, I would start up GreatNews and then leave it running in my system-tray. Almost immediately, I ran into the usual distraction problem – just when I was getting into a nice groove, I would see a popup that there were New!! (exclamation points mine) news items and inevitably I would give into temptation and open up GreatNews. Instant productivity breaker.
Since then I’ve learnt to fire up GreatNews only 2-3 times a day, which helps to keep the next problem in check..
- Don’t look at that unread counter!
When I was visiting sites via the bookmarks route, I would usually hit tech sites in the afternoon as my work-load slowed. With RSS, the minute I open up GreatNews in the morning to catch up with my friends’ photostreams, I would be faced with 310 unread items in my Tech news category. At first, I would experience information anxiety if I didn’t click and read all those news items right then.. and then of course, I would have spent an hour on reading feeds which would have been better used completing my work for the day.
- Some sites are better left off the RSS list
When visiting sites via a bookmark, you might never know just how many articles are posted on that site. You just hit the first page, scan the headlines and then hit “close tab” if nothing catches your eye. When it’s RSS however, the equation changes – you know exactly how many times a post appears on a site and if your feed reader is open and running all day, that can translate into a steady stream up of “new articles” pop-ups. After a few days, I deleted those feeds and recategorized some of my bookmarks into RSS and non RSS categories so that I could catch up these sites the old-fashioned way. I have atleast a couple of other feeds that might need to be pruned this way, but for now I’m happy with the update frequency I have achieved.
On balance (and admittedly, this is a short time-frame on which I’m basing my judgement) switching to RSS has helped ease my information anxiety overall. Sometimes, technology can actually be helpful.. who knew?