Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the Web.

http://www.slate.com/id/2217353/pagenum/all

by peter123 • 17 years ago

14 19 17 years ago

I used to use a similar system as the author. Then I upgraded to RSS. It seems as if he didn't have good system for RSS, but then found a good system for bookmarks. I use RSS, but I also use tabs. Instead of reading blogs in Google Reader, I use j (next item) and s (star to read later) with one hand, and middle click with the other. I get just the interesting stories, on their sites, and I can wade through uninteresting stories quicker. I never check a site redundantly either.

RossM• 17 years ago

I've been moving towards using aggregators, such as HN and reddit, as my RSS readers. I found myself not reading half the items in my blogs, and then finding the items I was reading in the HN/reddit feeds.

I now only have a few blogs (that don't come up on these aggregators; I only post links to them if they're relevant/interesting) and some strips I read in Google Reader and it works much better.

I've found that letting a community decide what I read much more productive for me (and there's always lists of "unapproved" items available) - you just have to find a community that seems interested in what you are.

edw519• 17 years ago

Good idea.

8:00 a.m. - Hacker News

9:00 a.m. - Hacker News

10:00 a.m. - Hacker News

11:00 a.m. - Hacker News

oh wait

Encosia• 17 years ago

There's no reason you can't use a system like that within an RSS reader. I have a couple dozen priority buckets in Google Reader, used to similar effect.

That way, I can easily declare RSS bankruptcy on spammy, low-value feeds such as TechCrunch without worrying about missing something important.

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

I use Google Reader for low-volume sources where I want to read every post (mostly friends' blogs, a few high-quality tech bloggers, work-related stuff), and a Planet Venus page for high-volume feeds that I don't mind missing sometimes (Twitter, kottke.org, Daring Fireball, O'Reilly Radar, ...). The Planet site updates only twice a day (so I don't check it constantly) and only saves the last 100 posts (so posts don't pile up if I'm away for a couple days).

carbon8• 17 years ago

Really, this isn't a hard concept to grasp: RSS is not email. You don't need to read everything. You don't need to feel overwhelmed. You don't need to feel guilty. What an RSS reader allows you to do is have a central location to categorize and read updates from all the sites you want to follow, and you get the added benefit of knowing what you've already seen. So what if you have 10000+ unread items across all feeds in your aggregator?

dimitar• 17 years ago

I like to disable the read/unread functionality and read only what grabs my attention.

sidsavara• 17 years ago

I like the gist of the article, but disagree with the opinion of dumping the RSS Reader. It seems to me that it's a mental shift that the author finds possible when using Firefox, but can't do with GReader

The "neutered RSS version" of the content is exactly what I want. I don't want ads. I don't want to see other headlines in the sidebar. I want to get through the content as quickly as possible, pick out the gems I like, and share them with friends. Opening up 15+ tabs is not my preferred method, though I can understand that it may work for others.

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I also submitted it to HN just now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591690

rufo2• 17 years ago

This system is the entire reason I switched to RSS (first with NetNewsWire, now Google Reader) in the first place. I found myself wasting an incredible amount of time just reloading a website to see if anything's new, processing the page, trying to figure out which articles I might have already read, etc.

Now, in Google Reader, I typically use the "all items" feed and blast through the list, only looking at the headlines. If something interests me, I'll either hit "s" to star it (meaning read later, not now), read it inline (if it's a full-text feed) or middle-click it to put it in a tab and read as soon as I'm done scanning.

If there's under 100 items, it probably only takes me about 5 minutes to go through them. If there are more, I'll typically load up the most post-heavy blogs (which I keep in a folder) and speed through them, then switch over to all feeds and read through them.

My only problem with my current system is that I check Google Reader way more often than I should - but I'm generally fairly happy with how I do it.

skorgu• 17 years ago

<AOL>

This is basically my system. I never hit anything but the all-items feed and I'm pretty strict about leaving zero unread before I navigate away so I can't just pop in for a quick read unless I've got at least 15 minutes to kill. I breeze past most items and middle-click anything interesting that's longer than a screenful.

The downside is I end up having a lot of open tabs with things I want to read.

rufo2• 17 years ago

I'm very aggressive about starring things.

I only middle-click things that immediately pique my curiosity or that are time-sensitive. If it's something long or that I can read later, it goes into the starred bin.

What's wound up happening is that I have (I think - Google doesn't give an exact count) several thousand starred items in that list that I have yet to read through. I used to feel pressured about this, but I've recently stopped worrying about it. If there's something important I want to come back to later, I can search through it, and if I didn't read it, obviously it can't have been that important.

doosra• 17 years ago

The author says "instead of scouring the Web for interesting stories, everything came to me!"

I believe the author is confusing the presentation of content with the filtering. The author went from using a browser, to an RSS reader, back to a browser. What remains unsolved is the problem of filtering uninteresting stories.

The real reason his new solution works is because he's manually filtered stories. But this approach doesn't scale with the number of websites that are being tracked.

What remains unsolved is an algorithm to find stories that are interesting to the author.

windsurfer• 17 years ago

Hacker News is my amazing system for browsing the web.

jerf• 17 years ago

This sounds exactly like Dave Winer's thoughts on how RSS readers should be structured, minus the correct solution: http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews

From reading the article, the author was clearly using an email-style aggregator. I strongly agree with Dave Winer; this may seem like a good idea at first, but it is grossly at odds with how the human brain works. River-of-news is the way to go and good keystrokes for scanning is the way to go. Google Reader is acceptable. (Ironic, since that's the picture used for the article, but it is clearly not what the author is using. If you look at the picture, it's what you get with a brand-new signup.)

bemmu2• 17 years ago

While Hacker News is almost the same as I ask, is there a way to filter items in my RSS feeds by ratings? For example not reading any entries unless other users have rated them at least 4 stars.

pclark• 17 years ago

check out postrank and their Google Reader plugin

bemmu2• 17 years ago

Great, seems to be exactly what I was describing. A bit confusing to join though, they should work on that.

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

Strange article. I started out agreeing that RSS could be better but then when I heard his response, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Maybe he should start using FriendFeed or iGoogle.

juneelijah• 17 years ago

using a bookmark-based system still has it's advantages. not every site has RSS. I get the best of both worlds by using Diffbot [http://www.diffbot.com].

Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the Web.

Related Stories