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RSS Readers Suck...right?

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Keylime

Keylime

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So I'm trying...TRYING to get RSS readers to be useful for me, but I just can't.

Seems like just about every feed I subscribe to only gives you like a paragraph, and only some give you the main article picture in the feed as well.

...so in order to actually read the article, I need to go to their website anyways...

Why even have RSS readers? Aren't these things really just serving as live update notification systems, not actually a readers?

...

I get it, those web pages want you to visit their site so they get ad revenue...but why even have an RSS feed if that's your ultimate goal? I visit the sites I care about like 50 times a day to check for updates, and that feels WAY better than relying on an RSS reader...because I can actually read the damn article when it's posted, and I'm giving that site a fuckton of views because I'm constantly refreshing.

...

Is there any possible way to make RSS readers not totally blow? My current workflow on my iPad is to send various articles from Reeder into Instapaper and read them there, but for some sites even THAT doesn't really get the full article properly.

On my computer I've used various readers, but it always ends with me going to the actual webpage.

Fucking thing sucks!

Am I doing it wrong or do these things really serve no purpose aside from live notification of updates?
 
Stop using websites that suck.

If a site doesn't give me the full content or at least a meaty couple of paragraphs to get started on, I drop it forever.

For generic top news, The Guardian in the UK has full content feeds on purpose. They're on top of this Internet thing.
 
They're for people who don't want to visit tons of sites 50 times a day to check for updates. If you're fine with doing that, then I don't really see an RSS reader being useful to you.

I couldn't tell you how many sites I have in my feed, or what their URLs are. It's just a lot more convenient to check my feed for new posts than to visit 50 websites over and over. I don't mind a summary of the article, if it interests me I can go to the site and read the whole thing.

Although I think most of the sites I subscribe to have the whole post/article on there.
 
Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:
Stop using websites that suck.

If a site doesn't give me the full content or at least a meaty couple of paragraphs to get started on, I drop it forever.

For generic top news, The Guardian in the UK has full content feeds on purpose. They're on top of this Internet thing.
Click to expand...
Mind giving me a list of your sources?

If it's just a matter of finding the right sites, I'm cool with narrowing my focus. It's just a total shame that major sites like engadget don't have full content through RSS. Pretty much none of my regular sites offer full content :(

...hell, put ads in the feed if they have to!
 
RubxQub said:
Mind giving me a list of your sources?

If it's just a matter of finding the right sites, I'm cool with narrowing my focus. It's just a total shame that major sites like engadget don't have full content through RSS. Pretty much none of my regular sites offer full content :(
Click to expand...
Also, if you're trying to look at everything the RSS pumps out, you might be doing it wrong. I use them to keep tabs on sites I frequent and only actually go through and read headlines that interest me. It's much easier way of keeping track of news and things on various websites, the alternative being having a bookmark bar and going to any given site several times a day.

I use Reeder for iPad and iPhone and Feedly for Chrome. Reeder is the one that gets most of my use, $2.99 if I recall and it's done way more than $2.99 worth of work.
 
Odious Tea said:
Also, if you're trying to look at everything the RSS pumps out, you might be doing it wrong.

I use them to keep tabs on sites I frequent and only actually go through and read headlines that interest me. It's much easier way of keeping track of news and things on various websites, the alternative being having a bookmark bar and going to any given site several times a day.
Click to expand...
Yeah, this is what I do with high-volume, general world/Canada news feeds. They only give me the headlines/blurb anyway.

I mostly use it so I don't have to constantly go back to those pages to check whether they have new content, not so that I never have to go to those pages.

Plus, the Better Google Reader add-on lets you load any page inside the GReader page.
 
It's shocking how many supposed Tech/Geeky sites do not know how to set up their content to make good use of RSS Reader's. I only stared using Readers more regularly with the debut of iPad, and I seem to have moved away from my regular go to sites as very few of them offer useful RSS stuff to be viewed at ease on that device

Thankfully the likes of Reeder and Pulse have a go to website option too, but that takes away the ease I want to use Reader for :(
 
54-46! said:
I've used Google Reader for a couple of years now.. pretty happy with it.
Click to expand...

Same here - though I think it is up to the individual websites to determine how much to deliver to the reader.. so it isn't really up to the reader to solve that issue, I don't think.

The sites I use, personally, give me enough information for me to determine whether I would like to read the rest of the article or not - I unsubscribe and stop visiting sites that just have a title + link [+ one or two lines of text]
 
I've alternated between Netvibes and Google Reader, currently using the latter. Both are great web-based services. However you're looking at apps for devices, and in that I'm totally with you that they usually suck. Some sites literally only push out the article title and to read anything you've got to visit the site.

It's a downer, contrary to the spirit of RSS, but I guess that's up to the site to decide.
 
If you have an iPhone get Reeder. Easily my most used app.

I didn't find RSS readers useful either until I got that app. Now I skim through my news significantly faster than I used to.
 
The_Inquisitor said:
If you have an iPhone get Reeder. Easily my most used app.

I didn't find RSS readers useful either until I got that app. Now I skim through my news significantly faster than I used to.
Click to expand...
It's what I use now, but it feels like for some sites it's a total waste, as sometimes I don't even get enough of a blurb to decide if the article is even good or not, so I end up having to read the mainsite anyways.

Bunch of hogwash!
 
RubxQub said:
It's what I use now, but it feels like for some sites it's a total waste, as sometimes I don't even get enough of a blurb to decide if the article is even good or not, so I end up having to read the mainsite anyways.

Bunch of hogwash!
Click to expand...
and it launches within that program. it's not a waste because the program centralizes all your news feeds and presents them in however way you want - linearly, by feed, etc. newsreaders also make it trivial to share links either through email or social networks.

if all you want is full text do what Liu Kang suggests and weed out anything that isn't.
 
scorcho said:
and it launches within that program. it's not a waste because the program centralizes all your news feeds and presents them in however way you want - linearly, by feed, etc. newsreaders also make it trivial to share links either through email or social networks.

if all you want is full text do what Liu Kang suggests and weed out anything that isn't.
Click to expand...
I just always figured the actual value in RSS was getting content without having to go to the site...it seemed perfect.

Have this thing running that's just checking for updates, and pulls those updates to your device/system whenever they're available.

Seems like if page impressions for ads is what's stopping this from taking off, they should just embed the ads within the RSS feed so everyone's happy.
 
Two things I did.

1) http://www.feedly.com/

2) Twitter for updates. Took me a while to get used to it but it's far faster than than scrolling through a reader update.

Barely use Google Reader vanilla unless I need to add a new feed.
 
Certain programs pull the entire article for you. Byline on the iPhone, NewsRob on Android.

But yes, you're right about lots of feeds sucking.
 
Bboy AJ said:
Certain programs pull the entire article for you. Byline on the iPhone, NewsRob on Android.

But yes, you're right about lots of feeds sucking.
Click to expand...
So something like Byline will actually scrape the website for the rest of the content and display that to you directly?

That sounds amazing.
 
I do try to minimize the number of sites that have limited feed content but it's harder and harder to find for the regular tech/ gaming sites.

for personal blogs it's a different story.

but it really doesn't bother me too much when i need to go to a website for info.

heck, even a good feed like kottke.org, which has full content feeds, still requires you to go to full sites because it's all about linking interesting, outbound content and not embedding it.

I might get more upset if i had very limited internet access but since i check out so much on the iphone, i can always review the content even if i'm on the go.

edit:

I just always figured the actual value in RSS was getting content without having to go to the site...it seemed perfect.
Click to expand...

that may have been true early on but sites now consider feeds a way to direct people to their sites instead of bypassing them entirely. as far as I'm concerned, I just want a notice if something's changed, if i can get the info from the feed, great. if i have to go to the site for a big piece of content, i don't mind. (small news blurbs are generally small enough to read within the truncated feed itself)
 
Considering that some people have migrated from RSS readers to Twitter as their primary source of news/info, where the "feeds" are even more constrained, you really are doing it wrong, Rubx.

A good RSS reader is about aggregating your favorite news and web updates into one, concise information portal. Scan article headlines quickly, more easily scan past the ones you're not interested in and lock on the ones you do. Yeah, sometimes you may still need to jump to the actual website to see the full article, but it's still a more efficient way to find the articles you want to read in full rather than visiting and scanning each site independently.

I don't mind sites that only post a paragraph or two to their RSS feeds, like Engadget - that's usually more than enough to figure out if the full article is worth reading. I'm even ok with a 1-2 sentence summary in the RSS feed sometimes. What I can't stand though is when there's advertising in each RSS item of a given feed and the advertising occupies more space than the content itself (Wired).
 
A brief summary of all the new articles from all the sites I visit. What a horrible idea. I should just go to the websites and read everything I'm not interested in. Problem solved.
 
RubxQub said:
It's what I use now, but it feels like for some sites it's a total waste, as sometimes I don't even get enough of a blurb to decide if the article is even good or not, so I end up having to read the mainsite anyways.

Bunch of hogwash!
Click to expand...
Just because it isn't what you expected or wanted it to be doesn't mean it's hogwash. I really enjoy using RSS feeds, if some sites provide the entirety of the content on the feed, awesome! If not, it doesn't really bother me to click through. They have content that interests me, of course I'll pursue it.
 
Google reader is great. Gmail, Google reader and Neogaf are 80% of my internet time at work. Plus (I hope) it doesn't look nearly as bad if anyone is monitoring my activity.
 
Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:
If a site doesn't give me the full content or at least a meaty couple of paragraphs to get started on, I drop it forever.
Click to expand...


Wisdom.

I once used Digg as an RSS source. Wow that was dumb.

Also you can get some really nice readers that will cache the web page for you as well.

Edit: let me also add that NewsRob for Android is fantastic. It is the one RSS reader I have seen that beats Reeder on the iDevices.
 
Guevara said:
Google reader is great. Gmail, Google reader and Neogaf are 80% of my internet time at work. Plus (I hope) it doesn't look nearly as bad if anyone is monitoring my activity.
Click to expand...

Yep. Google reader is the shit, I would use it to catch up on all my music blogs during my two hour econ class.
 
heh.... As others are saying.. you're doing it wrong. RSS is about he headlines only. I do fully agree with others that sites that give you a sentence or two in the feed suck ass (looking at IGN here), but I most certainly absolutely without question DO NOT want the entire article syndicated. I have a lot of general feeds from big news sites (CNN, NYT, etc) that I don't want every single story syndicated in full. A headline might grab me, but the synopsis shows me it's something else.

A GOOD site will do exactly that. Give you the headline, syndicate a good synopsis, and require you to click through (for the ad revenue) if you are interested. IMHO 1Up is a great example of this, and as a result bothers me just a little less when it comes to pagination on the stories.. I mean obviously I am deciding to click through from a meaty blurb on their feed.. the least I can do is toss them a few cents on ad revenue.

CNN is so so.. Usually a couple of sentences and not much more. Often that's enough. Many times I wish it was more.

Touch Arcade is an example of what you are talking about. And to be honest, I find it a total waste of bandwidth on their end. I typically skim through most of the stories without reading even half of them.. on my PC and iphone it turns out not to be too horrible, especially on the iphone where I only see the headline by default. But like I said, it still has to download the whole story from them in the feed, so it effectively wastes their bandwidth, especially when I would be satisfied with just a blurb (which all good CMS packages will automatically generate for you now and give you immediate access to as well).

IMHO Twitter is the worst for news. It always requires a click through for a link and most times you don't even know where you are clicking through to.. only hoping that something interesting is awaiting on the other side. I follow some people on twitter, but mostly use Facebook for friends' statuses and RSS (Google) for news.

Odious Tea said:
Just because it isn't what you expected or wanted it to be doesn't mean it's hogwash. I really enjoy using RSS feeds, if some sites provide the entirety of the content on the feed, awesome! If not, it doesn't really bother me to click through. They have content that interests me, of course I'll pursue it.
Click to expand...
exactly. If the feed is quality, you will click through anyway because you are interested in what they have. If the feed is bullshit (IGN) then of course you should feel annoyed for clicking through, but that's not RSS's fault but the fault of the site for giving you a shitty feed that you feel forced to click through just to get any real info.

A hammer doesn't suck just because a house someone else built with a hammer is a run down piece of shit.

edit - our local paper actually has a pretty good feed. it's just an excerpt, but it seems to be a manually selected excerpt from the story.. that's a perfect example of a feed that I have absolutely no objection to clicking through on.
 
Pctx said:
Two things I did.

1) http://www.feedly.com/

2) Twitter for updates. Took me a while to get used to it but it's far faster than than scrolling through a reader update.

Barely use Google Reader vanilla unless I need to add a new feed.
Click to expand...


This is excellent, thanks. Google reader was a bit too cluttery for me, so I needed this.
 
We should really start a official thread of recommendations for RSS readers. There are tons of sites I don't follow but have a good feature or two per month.
 
Guevara said:
We should really start a official thread of recommendations for RSS readers. There are tons of sites I don't follow but have a good feature or two per month.
Click to expand...
It'd probably be more productive to have a thread encompassing everything that goes into RSS. Recommend a few good readers on various platforms. Reccomend a few good starter sites. Things like that.
 
Odious Tea said:
It'd probably be more productive to have a thread encompassing everything that goes into RSS. Recommend a few Good readers on various platforms. Reccomend a few good starter sites. Things like that.
Click to expand...
It's true...if we had that, I probably wouldn't have made this...which has made everyone look like this :/
 
I think of them like headlines for the internet, if something catches my eye I go look on the site....
 
RubxQub said:
It's true...if we had that, I probably wouldn't have made this...which has made everyone look like this :/
Click to expand...
I think you would've. It just doesn't seem like RSS does what you want it to be. I think you'd still have the same frustration.
 
Its not the RSS Reader's fault. It's the news site.

I hate the fact that Penny Arcade doesn't have their feed set up to show in feed reader's. So I always have to click the link and go to their site.
 
Odious Tea said:
I think you would've. It just doesn't seem like RSS does what you want it to be. I think you'd still have the same frustration.
Click to expand...
It's sad, because RSS could very easily be what I want it to be...it's just the content providers aren't giving the goods.

Put ads in my RSS and give me the full article and I'll be a happy dude.
 
RubxQub said:
It's sad, because RSS could very easily be what I want it to be...it's just the content providers aren't giving the goods.

Put ads in my RSS and give me the full article and I'll be a happy dude.
Click to expand...
While it's unfortunate that it's not exactly what you want it to be, it's pretty close. You just have to learn to use it in a way that will work for you.

Which readers are you using and which sites are you subscribed to?
 
Odious Tea said:
While it's unfortunate that it's not exactly what you want it to be, it's pretty close. You just have to learn to use it in a way that will work for you.

Which readers are you using and which sites are you subscribed to?
Click to expand...
Currently using Google Reader for desktop (which I don't use, but use since it syncs with everything), and Reeder on the iPad.

Trying to get sites like:
- Engadget (gimped)
- MacRumors (gimped)
- Gizmodo (kinda gimped sometimes)
- Wired (gimped)
- TUAW (not gimped as far as I can tell)
- Macworld (GIMPED)
- Daring Fireball (not gimped as far as I can tell)
- Pittsburgh Tribune (gimped)
- PostGazette (gimped)
- WWTDD (gimped)
- The Superficial (not gimped as far as I can tell)

...and others, but pretty much all the ones I wanted don't work as I'd like.
 
So many tech sites, dude. You don't need all that mess, Daring Fireball will cover anything that's important. Engadget maybe, but I tend not to care about all those shitty gadgets.

An interesting trend I notice among my few nerd friends is that we all start with a load of tech blogs and eventually we all pared it down to one or none. It's really just a bunch of snarky assholes providing nearly meaningless short commentary on mostly bad technology or linkbait that just rewords corporate PR. Eventually you just start to follow only the personalities and lesser known blogs that you really enjoy with every post.
 
scorcho said:
grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg
Click to expand...
This implies I'm the one the needs to change for RSS readers, when they blow and everyone else is changing to deal with how much they suck.

Seems to me everyone else should care more about this, but have been beaten down into submission and they just deal with it.

You're all slaves to the man and I'm free! :lol

Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:
So many tech sites, dude. You don't need all that mess, Daring Fireball will cover anything that's important. Engadget maybe, but I tend not to care about all those shitty gadgets.

An interesting trend I notice among my few nerd friends is that we all start with a load of tech blogs and eventually we all pared it down to one or none. It's really just a bunch of snarky assholes providing nearly meaningless short commentary on mostly bad technology or linkbait that just rewords corporate PR. Eventually you just start to follow only the personalities and lesser known blogs that you really enjoy with every post.
Click to expand...
It's mainly because when I'm bored I just go trolling around the net looking for random stuff. I could definitely pare it down, though.
 
Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:
Daring Fireball will cover anything that's important...It's really just a bunch of snarky assholes providing nearly meaningless short commentary...
Click to expand...
furrows brow quizzically

RubxQub said:
This implies I'm the one the needs to change for RSS readers, when they blow and everyone else is changing to deal with how much they suck.

Seems to me everyone else should care more about this, but have been beaten down into submission and they just deal with it.
Click to expand...
why? it's a minor inconvenience to read content after another click, or to use a newsreader that will retrieve it automatically through javascript.
 
If you are arguing that RSS readers should always show the full article automatically rather than showing an excerpt of the article and giving you the choice of viewing the whole thing, you are in the minority.

Even if you go to the front page of the sites you listed, they do it the same way: show the headline and a brief excerpt of the article, then link to the full version.
 
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