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RSS Readers Suck...right?

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the biggest difference is to have all of your data in the same place in the same basic format.

the data contained in the RSS feeds is often analogous to titles and little blurbs available on said websites and blogs. lots of blogs have only the first few paragraphs available, and you have to click through to see the rest.
 
It sounds like your problem has more to do with what's available on your platform (iPad?) than anything else. I'm on Windows 7 and I used to use Omea Reader, but I switched to Feed Demon a couple years back. Both work well, though I prefer Feed Demon. It has tab support built in so even when you do have to click through it doesn't need to open a new browser or anything. You never have to leave Feed Demon itself to anything. I don't know if there's anything similar on the iPad.
 
Yeef said:
It sounds like your problem has more to do with what's available on your platform (iPad?) than anything else. I'm on Windows 7 and I used to use Omea Reader, but I switched to Feed Demon a couple years back. Both work well, though I prefer Feed Demon. It has tab support built in so even when you do have to click through it doesn't need to open a new browser or anything. You never have to leave Feed Demon itself to anything. I don't know if there's anything similar on the iPad.
The InstaPaper Mobilizer option within Reeder was perfect for me.

Adds an extra click ot the whole process, but removes the need to load any full webpage to get at the content. Keeps everything nice and smooth with only a minor inconvenience of an extra click...which is a-OK with me!
 
Brettison said:
Yeah my bad my typing has sucked lately.

Anyways I know HE doesn't care about that, but like alot of things that I don't have any personal investment in the people with the product or service DO care. I'll admit some site do RSS better than others, but I still think the biggest problem is how to make it something useful for your site without pulling away money you might need to pay for website up keep. Then again while they are totally different things I think podcasts have this same issue as well.
Yeah podcasts are my one issue. Is there a good podcast client for Macs? The best one I've used is drpodder on WebOS but even that doesn't link to the original web page :/
 
Been using a RSS reader addon for firefox for years now. Never gone back and I never will, makes it so easy to quickly check updates and news on different sites, especially gaming ones that are updated constantly.
 
Charred Greyface said:
Yeah podcasts are my one issue. Is there a good podcast client for Macs? The best one I've used is drpodder on WebOS but even that doesn't link to the original web page :/


yeah, itunes :P
 
Charred Greyface said:
Another option is to use the Instapaper mobilizer in Reeder.

I'm looking forward to the bookmark syncing feature in Android 2.2.

This is great for when I bookmark something at work, and want to read it on the commute home via my phone. It's the little things :-D
 
RubxQub said:
I visit the sites I care about like 50 times a day to check for updates,
jesus, 50 times a day? Something about too much time on ones hands etc.
 
captive said:
jesus, 50 times a day? Something about too much time on ones hands etc.

Wouldn't be surprised if your average RSS user checks their feeds 100 times a day :lol . When you work a desk job, you need little breaks.
 
borghe said:
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.

Completely agreed. Quite a few blogs put the full thing in, with a bunch of extra crap at the bottom, and this disrupts my Google Reader flow (spacing through new stories to "clear" them from the reader, stopping at the articles I find interesting.)

I think Digg also gets away with just having a sentence or two. Just the nature of the site. For other sites though, I want a meaty (1-2 paragraph) summary. Ideally, if it's a piece of news, usually the headline tells me what I need to know, the paragraph gives the overview, and the full website gives all the details.

Fatalah said:
Wouldn't be surprised if your average RSS user checks their feeds 100 times a day :lol . When you work a desk job, you need little breaks.

This is why Chrome + Google Reader extension is great. I use the unofficial one that just displays the unread amount, and if you click it you're sent to the full Reader site. That and Gmail Checker are awesome for that. No more manually going to the sites and being disappointed there's no news.
 
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.

Yeah. I had to cut down the Android blogs I was following to just AndroidGuys because of that. I used to follow like five different ones, but not only does the editorial quality range quite severely, it's also entirely an echo chamber. Even if one gets an exclusive, it's blasted across the others within a matter of hours.

I have BGR, Giz, Engadget, and TechCrunch bookmarked, but I'm not subscribed to them because I don't care about 80% of what they say. When I get bored, I choose to go there and sort through the stuff myself, I don't need their bajillion posts a day clogging up my reader.

RubxQub said:
Bookmarks > RSS.

:lol F5-ing and loading up a bunch of websites doesn't sound ideal to me. With RSS you can subscribe and forget it (until you're alerted of new options.) Before I tried RSS, tons of news updates from sites I liked, but forgot about, fell through the cracks. Now, RSS catches them all.

Just the thought of having to navigate bookmarks all day makes me queazy... Thanks to RSS and the bookmarks bar, I barely even touch the bookmark menu nowadays.
 
Yeef said:
It sounds like your problem has more to do with what's available on your platform (iPad?) than anything else. I'm on Windows 7 and I used to use Omea Reader, but I switched to Feed Demon a couple years back. Both work well, though I prefer Feed Demon. It has tab support built in so even when you do have to click through it doesn't need to open a new browser or anything. You never have to leave Feed Demon itself to anything. I don't know if there's anything similar on the iPad.

I could kiss you, you beautiful son of a bear.
 
Andrex said:
:lol F5-ing and loading up a bunch of websites doesn't sound ideal to me. With RSS you can subscribe and forget it (until you're alerted of new options.) Before I tried RSS, tons of news updates from sites I liked, but forgot about, fell through the cracks. Now, RSS catches them all.

Just the thought of having to navigate bookmarks all day makes me queazy... Thanks to RSS and the bookmarks bar, I barely even touch the bookmark menu nowadays.
I blame GAF, as I probably refresh this place like 200 times a day...who knows if that's an exaggeration or not... :lol

But luckily with InstaPaper Mobilizer I'm happy as can be with RSS feeds on my iPad, as it gives me that 3 tiered approach I was talking about in my posts above.

...doesn't change the fact that RSS feeds without InstaPaper Mobilizer totally blow donkey balls, though :D
 
I use full feeds to circumvent the Websense filters we have at work. Luckily they don't block Google Reader. Still, there are plenty of sources that only hand out snippets of articles.
 
RubxQub said:
...doesn't change the fact that RSS feeds without InstaPaper Mobilizer totally blow donkey balls, though :D
again, I disagree and most certainly have not been "beaten into submission". I already have the three tiered approach you described. Headlines, synopsis (paragraph or two for good sites, sentence or two for shit sites), then click through for the content.

While I understand that YOU want full articles syndicated in a single reader, I really think you are going to have to come to acceptance that you are in a minority on this one. I want a news ticker. If something catches my eye give me a handful of sentences more (without ads). If it is genuinely interesting I'll click through for the full content with ads. If I start getting pages and pages of content that I might not care about and with ads to boot..... well fuck, you just made RSS entirely pointless.

Really Simple Syndication
 
scorcho said:
i'm going to start a HTML viewers suck thread because i hate how certain websites look.
Such a drama-queen, Scorch. :lol
 
I know the old man has yelled at the cloud and made peace with it by now, but I just wanted to put my two cents out there. I use Google Reader to manage different types of news that I follow and all the different headlines. Kotaku and the various blogs that just post PR releases and put the barest of content in their previews annoy me, but I rarely read their full articles. But anyway, it keeps it easier for me from having to go to 10-15 sites throughout the day to see what updates they have, and just going to my reader and seeing new headlines and clicking on what I want to click on. Simplifies my life a little.
 
borghe said:
again, I disagree and most certainly have not been "beaten into submission". I already have the three tiered approach you described. Headlines, synopsis (paragraph or two for good sites, sentence or two for shit sites), then click through for the content.

While I understand that YOU want full articles syndicated in a single reader, I really think you are going to have to come to acceptance that you are in a minority on this one. I want a news ticker. If something catches my eye give me a handful of sentences more (without ads). If it is genuinely interesting I'll click through for the full content with ads. If I start getting pages and pages of content that I might not care about and with ads to boot..... well fuck, you just made RSS entirely pointless.

Really Simple Syndication
The 3 tiered approach solves both of our problems, though. I don't think we really disagree there.

You get your same shitty 2 tiered approach with hardly any information as to whether or not the article is worth reading, and then you can jump to the third tier if you think you like what you see. The difference is that my 3rd tier is the same user experience as the first 2, and your 3rd tier is something entirely different that takes longer to load, but is represented as the content provider intended.

The good news is that we can both have the 3rd tier that we'd like, me with InstaPaper Mobilizer and you with the full webpage, so everyone wins!

For the desktop experience, full pages are probably fine.
For the mobile experience, I want it in the same app in the same way the first 2 tiers are delivered for the fastest delivery and smoother interface experience.
 
Twitter and Tweetdeck with various columns dedicated to specific areas of news has completely replaced RSS feeds for me.
 
RubxQub said:
For the desktop experience, full pages are probably fine.
For the mobile experience, I want it in the same app in the same way the first 2 tiers are delivered for the fastest delivery and smoother interface experience.
I think this is something most people will agree with.
 
This just hit Hacker News: fulltextrssfeed.com " Full Text RSS Feed: Get the whole feed and nothing but the feed."

I figured it might come in handy for some people. I actually came to recommend it to RubxQub, anyone know what happened to him?
 
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