Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248623

by dominik • 18 years ago

18 43 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How do you read RSS feeds?

How many feeds are you subscribed to? How do you read them: Skim all posts? Read selectively? Read everything? Why do you read feeds the way you do? If you don't, why do you choose not to?

amarcus• 18 years ago

i don't use feeds. I like visiting actual sites. In firefox, i have a bookmarks folder called "daily read" and i open its contents in tabs.

dominik2• 18 years ago

I ask because I currently have about 100 feeds in Google Reader; most of them update fairly infrequently. I try to only subscribe to feeds that have full text, since I dislike excerpts because I have to open a new tab. That said, I try to read all my feeds, but often fall behind (260 unread at the moment). I find catching up takes too long and I just have to press 'Mark All as Read.'

Perhaps I need to adjust my approach to feeds to maximize my information/time; I tend to cycle between subscribing to many feeds and then unsubscribing from many. My biggest trouble is with feeds that are high volume (1 post/day or more) yet have interesting content. These can be enormous timesinks if I'm not careful.

ajkirwin• 18 years ago

Generally? I don't. Until I can get such information via feeds, presented nicely and in an aggregatable way, I will just visit individual sites.

gaika• 18 years ago

There are ~300 feeds where I skim all the posts and ~20 that are a must read in a separate bucket on google reader. Feeds are so critical to what I do that I have to keep up with them even after a vacation. Which means ~1000 messages in the "inbox" from time to time. There are ~100 other feeds that I wish I had time to read, but unfortunately their volume is too high for me to keep up.

Really want to change that, so there's no fixed "inbox", but the posts that are critical should bubble up to top, and the rest should only be findable with specific topic searches.

vasudeva• 18 years ago

I use irssi (CLI Linux IRC client) for a ton of things -- it's basically my dashboard -- and have eventually hit upon the strategy of running an rbot (a Ruby infobot-alike by linuxbrit) and using its RSS plugin to monitor about 60 feeds in a private channel. It sits in a separate irssi window along with IRC, email, AIM, and stocks, and is nice because I can use irssi's controls (or rbot's) to do things like highlighting or ad-hoc scripting.

These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.

I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored.

bprater2• 18 years ago

Points for creativity!

brandonkm2• 18 years ago

Currently I use rojo, although I heard they are undergoing a transformation (new name, etc.). I think theres a lot of room for improvement in the RSS reader space, but they currently offer the best type of reader from what i've seen out there.

dominik2• 18 years ago

What's different with rojo v. Google Reader? How is it better?

brandonkm2• 18 years ago

They both share a lot of similar features (user ratings, tags/labels, discovering new feeds, etc.), but overall I enjoy the design/layout of rojo better. In addition to that, as far as actually discovering new things online, rojo provides a better platform for that (imo). I can see whats popular, whats popular with people in my network, etc. I've used google reader quite a bit and its really good, but I enjoy the rojo experience more.

ptm• 18 years ago

I track around 30 feeds (news / high frequency) on Firefox Live Bookmarks on a daily basis.

I also track around 800 feeds (opinion / lower frequency) on Netvibes on a weekly / biweekly basis.

cypress-hill• 18 years ago

left to right

johns• 18 years ago

I use Bloglines because their mobile versions (simple mobile version and iPhone version) are superior to Google Readers. I have 114 feeds divided up into folders by interest area. Some folders like "Development", "Design" and "Competitors" are higher priority reads. I have a few top-level feeds that aren't in folders that are the highest priority.

anirbas• 18 years ago

I use Opera's feed reader at present, but mainly because I read some cookie-protected feeds and an in-browser one seems like the best solution. I keep a pretty tight leash on the feeds I subscribe to (twelve or so at the moment), and delete any I ignore for several days.

pjackson• 18 years ago

I use Apple Mail. It shows individual feeds as if they were a mailbox, all grouped under and RSS container. Unfortunately, this keeps me addicted to HN throughout the day rather than just once or twice a day.

wallflower• 18 years ago

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.

paulgb• 18 years ago

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.

bprater2• 18 years ago

I'm embarrassed to say that not once, but several times, I've collect loads of feeds and then rarely made good on reading them all.

The stuff I was interested in would change over time, so I was left with feeds I wasn't so interested in anymore. I tried different feedreaders. And I would always feel overwhelmed when I saw 4,283 unread messages.

So I'm back trying it again with a "must read" folder in Google Reader and only putting feeds in that I definitely want to read.

But when I do subscribe and am committed to reading, I try to make an effort to at least open every post and start reading it.

drewp• 18 years ago

Why is this so emotional for you? Writers barely know if you're reading, so it doesn't seem worth any stress or "overwhelming" feelings for you to work so hard on selecting feeds or catching up on them.

swombat• 18 years ago

Strange, this thread is full of luddites who don't use RSS!

Anyway, I use Google Reader. I tend to read everything I subscribe to. If I don't read it, I unsubscribe to it after I've ignored it long enough. I have maybe 30-40 subscriptions, all to sites that post infrequently, so I rarely have more than a handful of articles unread.

I get a lot of interesting articles via Hacker News too, and also via Google-Reader recommendations (one of GReader's killer features imho).

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

Top to bottom, left to right.

Seriously, I'm subscribed to about 40 feeds, but I usually don't even start my feed browser because it's a time sink.

The S/N ratio with most blogs isn't very high, but I subscribe just to get that occasional important nugget of information/insight.

But I am coming to the realization that RSS is a bit of a distraction - if I start my RSS reader, I feel obliged to read everything just to get rid of the 'unread' icon. It doesn't really help me build great stuff.

arthurk• 18 years ago

I'm using Google Reader for mostly personal blogs but visit sites like HN directly since they tend to clutter my whole feed reader. I had subscribed to the HN feed for a long time but since the feed displays every blog post that hits the frontpage there were a lot of uninteresting entries.

I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).

The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.

For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes).

ragaskar• 18 years ago

It would be nice if the HN feed included the short description -- I find that titles are often too brief to evaluate whether or not it's worth clicking through. Additionally, a comment count would be welcomed.

Including a rating, or including a dynamic feed for a particular rating would be icing on the cake.

fwiw, i'm a happy google reader user -- 158 subscriptions. The only downside is that it's my go-to procrastination website. I read just about all RSS content, and click through about 10-20% of the time depending on the feed. If I find that I clear the unread on a feed more than once or twice, I'll usually unsubscribe (because obviously I don't have the time to keep up with it). Sometimes I use feeds as a glorified bookmark.

makecheck• 18 years ago

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.

mbleigh• 18 years ago

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.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

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

ThomasQ• 18 years ago

Could you give some URLs please ? I did not have much luck with Google for "The Yegges" and "Mosers".

mickt• 18 years ago

Sage a Firefox plugin, and sometimes Google Reader.

darose• 18 years ago

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.

tc7• 18 years ago

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.

silentbicycle• 18 years ago

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

hbien• 18 years ago

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.

antiform• 18 years ago

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.

GilbertErik• 18 years ago

I think the key for me is subscribing to more posts than I could ever possibly read, and giving myself permission to not have to read all of them.

Much like I used to read a newspaper, I've turned google reader into my information aggregator. It alerts me to daily podcasts, local/regional/national/global/financial news, interesting articles, etc... I read what's interesting, throw the rest away, star whatever I may want to revisit or leisurely read on the weekend, share whatever I want people to see on my blog, and 'mark all as read' when I start my weekend.

I skim whenever I'm waiting on a build or have a spare minute between meetings, but I separate out into categories things I'd like to read and things I may read if there's extra time. I spend about 2-3 hours a week in google reader, but much less time wading through comments and ads for a net gain.

captain-m• 18 years ago

Exactly. Another factor when you subscribe to a lot of feeds is overlap. I subscribe to all sites I find interesting so more often than not the articles I probably wouldn't want to miss show up on multiple sites. This way I can hit 'Mark all as read' without feeling like I've missed something.

From the trends page on google reader: "From your 114 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,483 items."

DrStrngeluv• 18 years ago

I just started using Google Reader about 3 weeks ago. I'm currently subscribed to approximately 30 feeds, and I tend to skim the headlines on the busier sites, and then read whatever might catch my eye. On the slower sites, or blogs from folks that I know, I tend to read the whole article, or give up after I decide that I'm just not interested. I have it configured to purge already read posts, so I just page down the busier blogs until I finish, or stumble upon something I like. I also tend to use the mark all read after the weekend or a day or two off, since I don't have the time to sift through too much detritus from not servicing my feeds. I think with news/social news sites like reddit & slashdot, which I had subscribed to, and subsequently unsubscribed to, have too much noise to lend themselves to reading in an RSS feed.

place• 18 years ago

Reading 20 feeds with newsbeuter (http://synflood.at/newsbeuter.html)

Fast, simple, console-friendly, familiar keybindings and gets the job done without any distractions.

What more could you possibly wish for?

pauljonas• 18 years ago

NetNewsWire

Have embarked upon a quest to break it — up to ~1000 feeds, and although it stalls out my MBP during huge updates, it's held up very well. Tried Google Reader but at about ~200 feeds, it crapped out and the whole AJAXy UI became totally unmanageable (plus, frequent bouts where the server never returned) — Google Reader issues may have been rectified, but at time I experimented with it, it was unwieldy.

I need to do some housekeeping to NNW — presently, I sort by feed source, and just fly through/ignore about half the feeds (especially the ones with frequent updates). It seems the more frequent the update, the less the quality fare, though HN is an exception in this regard. Really need to set up folder buckets to bury those that I might want to read, given extra time.

I scan and can flip through titles and first few paragraphs rapidly (3 pane view).

It really is a more efficient reading experience that magnifies your news/blog coverage, but you need to refine, and dispense with the ones that don't add value or at least bury them.

There is a dichotomy in reading experience via RSS vs. the Web that I will write an article about at some future point and lay out all my thoughts — lots of good stuff out there that has no RSS or content that RSS is not sufficiently capturing the content (some titles only or less than a sentence in body, or web site styling that enhances the viewership experience).

OTOH, the big benefit of RSS is getting to read without the extraneous, tarted up graphic fare in a font size/style more suited to reading text on a monitor.

soldarnal• 18 years ago

I consume feeds (ten in total) in two different ways: my iGoogle Homepage and the Opera Feeds reader.

For the iGoogle Homepage I have HN and /. feeds. These feeds are updated so frequently that I don't want to subscribe to them in my reader (and have the unread ones pile up). These I read selectively - only the titles that interest me.

The Opera Feed reader I use for blogs that get updated at most daily. For the most part, I read every entry, skipping only the ocassional esoteric post. I used to read these ones in Google Reader; but once I discovered Opera's reader is much faster, I haven't gone back. (It would be nice if their synch system did feeds too, though.) I like to use the reader for these because it helps me keep track of what I've read, keeps all my daily/weekly reading in one place, and for feeds that include their content since they load considerably faster without the overhead of their site (e.g. Dilbert Blog).

EastSmith• 18 years ago

Bloglines, about 150 feeds.

I use about 10 categories: must read, local, off topic, certain topic, like say Python, Javascript, etc.

It was a big problem before I started leaving unread categories for a couple of days. Now it is great. Read couple of categories on daily basis, then the other, when I have time, or sometimes mark them all as read (I hate myself for that later).

OT: Since when Bloglines became so unpopular? Or is it just HN trend? Does Google Reader rule the blog readers world now?

zitterbewegung• 18 years ago

I use safari's built in RSS reader or Google Reader. I usually read the whole feed unless it is quite large and then I skim them or read the first 10.

Kilimanjaro• 18 years ago

Google Reader for all feeds except slashdot, digg, reddit and HN which I visit directly in my browser.

patrocles• 18 years ago

rss2email -- rocks for blogs where you don't want to miss a single post (friends and other high S/N feeds)

In general thought, most news actually isn't news. It's just data and we need to model what we actually care about, and then monitor for that.

E.g. I don't really care that there's a war in Darfur, I care that the world has more armed conflicts now than last year. So write a script to keep track of them (scrape wikipedia) and when the number goes up, email yourself to write a check to UNHCR.

toxik• 18 years ago

/Applications/Mail.app

I highly recommend it to anyone on OS X Leopard. Mail doesn't count unread RSS entries as unread mail, so RSS feeds become more of a "you could potentially look at this when you have nothing to do, and these are the entries you didn't read". It's good.

Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

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