iotae.net

A combination of school, vacation and illness has kept me from writing for a while. That hasn’t kept the readership here from growing considerably (as measured by people who mention it to me); we may hit the double-digits soon.

I have always liked the idea of an RSS reader. These things are supposed to go to websites you frequent and pull down new stories, making it easier for you to thumb through and find ones you care about and haven’t read. In other words, you spend less time clicking on random websites looking for new stories, because you know where you are going to go and what is going to be there. Kind of like TV Guide for the web.

However, I have never regularly used an RSS reader. Every times I tried one I seemed to dislike the experience. The readers tended to have many features that caused irritating animated things to appear on my screen at inopportune times, but they still did not make it easy to quickly browse the sites I was interested in. Also, at one point few sites were equipped to be read by these kinds of readers. So I never used them for long. (NetNewsWire on the Mac looked like a nice alternative, but that was just one in a long list of reasons to justify buying a TiBook.)

A couple of days ago I decided to revisit the world of RSS readers. I finally found one that (when properly configured) does what I want it to do well, and little else. I have settled on SharpReader, which is a solid product if not a stellar one. The trick is to fix the program’s bad default settings. You can do this by highlighting ‘Subscribed Feeds’ on the top of the left pane, and adjusting the settings on the bottom of that pane. I recommend setting AlertNewItems to ‘No’ so nothing obtrusive pops up on your desktop, setting AutoOpenLinks to ‘Always’ so you won’t waste time reading excerpts of articles, and choosing a low RefreshRate so you always no when new news is coming in.

I then decided to find RSS feeds for every site I frequent on the internet. Most weblogs come with them (for this one it is behind the ‘Syndicate This Site’ link), so they were easy to cover. A number of news organizations provide them too, and there are unofficial ones for many of those that don’t. The best site I can find for locating these is Bloglines. When my list of feeds stabilizes I will post it. Each site is placed into a group involving how regularly I want to read it. Some I want to make sure to read every article on. Some I want to scan all the headlines but only read selected articles. Some I want to glance at, but I don’t mind at all if I miss an article. Then I can cover all the websites I would have surfed just by clicking on each group and scanning the new headlines. It lets me cover a lot more of the web in far less time.

SharpReader supports these curious new Atom feeds that show up on some websites. Instead of giving you a headline which helps you to navigate to a site, they give you all the information so you never have to visit the site. This gives you the option of setting SharpReader not to visit the site, and doing all of your reading without whatever color or graphics of other adornments personalize the site you are reading from. This is interesting, and there are definitely some sites for which I could do without much of their clutter. However, these inevitably never have Atom feeds.

There are definitely a few annoyances. The tool is based on the IE engine, and while it blocks popups, there are all sorts of other IE-specific types of advertising that I am used to living without which show up in it. Some of the feeds fail to work some of the time. SharpReader fails to refresh web pages when it needs to.

But the biggest annoyance is that it works too well. There is no surprise in going to a website when you know whether there will be something new there. And I surf the web to procrastinate and kill time, so making it too efficient is counterproductive. I am now following ten times as many websites as I used to, and it only takes me a few minutes to see if anything new is worth reading. Still, I won’t give it up. In fact, now the prospect of checking websites one at a time seems positively primitive. I’ll just have to find another way to procrastinate. Maybe less than a month will go by between site update spurts. I have a number of things to write about, including new movies by the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman, digital music and the new David Byrne CD my vacation and a piece on drug prices I have been thinking about for six months.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2004 at 1:51 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.