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March 30, 2003
RSS. Sucks.
In a fit of organisation, and a realisation that reading 140+ blogs by clicking on bookmarks and hoping probably wasn't a good idea, I spent some time getting it all into an RSS reader. A lot of time.
RSS readers suck.
Blogs suck.
Blogging software sucks.
In the end, I settled on NewzCrawler. It offered at least a small section of the functionality I would expect. I'm going to have a play with NetNewsWire soon, as I can only hope that it's seriously better than all the Windows RSS readers out there.
What was I looking for? Something that lets me drag bookmarks onto it. Something that is reasonably intelligent at guessing what I want to do with it. Something I can use at home, at work, anywhere. Something that isn't some cruddy script to try and install on a server. Something that knows me, learns about me, sits in the background and second guesses what I want it to do. Something integrated into my normal browsing, and normal routines. Something easy to add into my routine.
It doesn't exist yet. I have a feeling it never will. I read *somewhere* (one negative point of using an RSS browser - you really will never remember who said what) that people will be reading 10,000 feeds in the next couple of years. I completely agree. However, it will not be called RSS. It will not be called blogging. It will not be supplied by a traditional software firm, or anything that calls itself a software firm currently (at the moment, I kinda wish Microsoft would do an RSS reader, just because I feel we're at the Lotus/WordPerfect horridness stage, with the current players out of touch with real people trying to cope with all this technology).
The newscrawler interface is all over the place. The three pane idea works, but the implementation is muddled, especially dialogue boxes, and some of the multi-step processes. Adding a feed is hard, and the dialogues are random.
Autodiscovery is a great idea. It should work well. It doesn't:
- Many blogs tells the reader just the place on the site (i.e. index.xml) rather than the whole URL. I think some blogging tools do this out-of-the-box. Feedreader barfs on this.
- Some sites have many autodiscoverable feeds. Don't. As there's no way to indicate the primary (best) one, the reader tries and grabs them all. Which means you may get 5 versions of the same feed.
- Some quasi-standard for where the hell your RSS feed lives would improve the situation no end. I get the feeling most blogging software should generate XML automatically, and may even be doing it, but the link has been taken out when designing the templates. There's theoretically no way to guess a feed URL. It's a pity.
- Once I have a feed, I don't want to subscribe to it again. So don't ask me.
More standard gripes - some tools (like weblogs.com) supply bad RSS. Movable Type only syndicates summaries. Which is useless, if you just want to read stuff in the reader. Newscrawler randomly can't read and verify feeds when adding, then has no problems when added.
It seems that a good dose of UCD, and even just testing, would help many of these tools. Developers, get your mum to use it. Heck, just even try to explain what it does. Learn from the cluestick hovering above your head.
Can anyone suggest better RSS readers?
(PS. I still have 49 sites that I can't find feeds for. I think NewsCrawler can handle these as well, but it's going to take a lot more gin and sympathy before I get enough steam up to discover how.)
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