Diogenes of RSS
Posted on January 4th, 2007by Michael Gray in Random Thoughts, Tools
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Sometimes I feel like Diogenes who walked the ancient marketplaces of Greece looking for an honest man and never finding one.
Sadly my quest for a feed reader that gives me what I want is still unfulfilled. My last experiment SharpReader came wonderfully close. It was desktop and discovered new feeds on a schedule or demand with no latency. It allowed me to flag and mark posts. I was able to quickly move the next post by hitting the space bar. Sadly it kept rediscovering feeds I had read days ago as unread. When you have about 150+ feeds you scan/read it’s becomes a huge waste of time (and terribly annoying) to keep rereading things you already read. So I’m back to sage. My biggest beefs with Sage are it takes two keystrokes to advance and open a feed, instead of the single spacebar like google reader or sharpreader. Because I read 150+ feeds that’s 150 extra keystrokes at least twice per day. It also lacks the ‘flag feature’ so I just end up sending myself an email and it sits in my inbox with a “follow up” flag. So right now I have chose between reading things multiple times, or hitting the keyboard multiple times. Neither of which makes me happy.
So I continue to wander the blogosphere looking for an honest RSS reader …
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January 4th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Have you tried FeedShow? It’s fairly new and a little buggy at times, but is my favorite online one so far.
January 4th, 2007 at 11:23 am
How about feeddemon, in combination with newsgator? It’s a combination that works for me fine!
January 4th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Maybe I missed it.. but did you try Thunderbird?
Spacebar advances page wise through post and when at end, jumps to next unread post… even if that’s in a different “folder”…
Single key flagging “I”.
Each feed in own folder.
oh yeah… and free.
January 4th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Do you see this duplicate problem in SharpReader in ALL feeds - or just some. It may be that the feed publisher is to blame (updating publishing time-stamps etc) every time they fix a typo or re-publish the feed?
January 4th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Remind me why Reader didn’t work for you again?
Props for the Diogenes reference, BTW.
January 4th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
>Remind me why Reader didn’t work for you again?
The latency thing just irks me, shockingly I’m an instant gratification kinda guy. I totally understand why after Mihai explained it, but I still want it. Re Diogenes every so often we gotta throw a little culture around this place.
January 4th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I’ve built my own feedreader as a web app, but I’ve been hesitant to let anyone else try it as I’m sure it’s not scalable and I don’t have the time to make it so. I also built it to my own tastes, apparently same as yours, but I’m of the opinion that everyone has personal features they might like but that it’d be hard to please a large group of users without re-inventing the thing constantly.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I tried to replicate the issue you’re having with SharpReader and I can’t do it, which makes me think it’s a feed issue and not a reader issue.
January 9th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’ve had the occaisonal rediscovering feeds, but I also think it’s a feed issue and not a reader issue. I had much greater problems with Omea Reader telling me the post was new when it was old. In both cases, these issues are happening with the same blogs, reinforcing the idea of the feed issue.