Comments on: Can’t be RSSed

By: Scottish Roundup » Blog Archive » SBR 24: Trident, the budget and… RSS

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:22:57 +0000

[...] Doctorvee has been pre-occupied with other matters: “I have been thinking a little bit about RSS recently…I have had an [...]

By: Prolix

Prolix — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:57:57 +0000

I am much the same. It’s fine all the time that I check the feeds (I use desktop application - Feedreader) daily but as soon as I let it slip the trouble starts. Your attention is grabbed by the 378 unread count and like Robin I start to indiscriminately mark things read without really reading them just to lower the unread count and make myself feel both better and more productive. RSS is incredibly useful but not in the way I thought it would be, far from a time saving device, I find myself reading more than I would have done before embarking on the RSS project, I still use my browser for many sites though, comment feeds in RSS are quite unreliable - or so I have found - and so I find that any sites where comments are likely to be of interest are better read in Firefox. So in effect I have the best of both worlds. And the worst.

Really interesting post though and I’m glad to find that I’m not the only one who feels pressurised by their own RSS count!

By: MatGB

MatGB — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:25:26 +0000

Ping! Facebook, networks, feeds and friends

Wot I said:

I (still) prefer LJ for feeds, if I miss stuff because I’m away, I don’t feel like I’ve a massive backlog, and can just look at a much more filtered view, without having to mark all unread. I keep thinking of experimenting with some proper feedreading software, but I do everything else via web based services these days, seems a bit of a backwards step TBH.

Yeah, I gave up on Google Reader, it’s ok, but, well, not great. Back to just LJ as an aggegator, and relying on people to link to good stuff, and checking main sites directly. Seems to work well enough.

By: James O'Malley

James O'Malley — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:08:25 +0000

This sounds uncannily similar to what I’m experiencing- I now read practically everything (around 200 feeds) through Google Reader, and its dawned on me that I only really visit four websites these days: Google Reader, Facebook (I shouldn’t admit to this), Wikipedia and, er, my hit counter.

The horrible thing is that whenever I visit Google Reader, I find myself unable to do _anything else_ until I’ve got the counter down to zero… and if I’m having a bad day, Google will no doubt find some new posts to read in a “completed” category whilst I’m reading through another.

I dare say that I even get a degree of anxiety when having to visit OTHER WEBSITES that I’m not familiar with the layout of.

By: lambic

lambic — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:52:24 +0000

I take the middle road between trying to read all the posts and unsubscribing all together. If one of my feeds has many unread articles and it’s not that important to me, I’ll just mark all as read. That way I can keep BBC News in my reader, but not have to skim 300 posts on monday morning.