Organising your news reading
Promotion and Relegation (in RSS) describes how Sarabian divides up the newsfeeds he reads into categories of interest — those at the top get religiously read, those at the bottom get scanned quickly. Apart from inviting the “which division am I in?” question from half the people on his list (don’t tell me, I don’t want to know), this sort of organisation fills me with envy. I wish I could do something like this; very neat. Presumably this is made available through SharpReader, which is his aggregator of choice (iirc). I don’t like desktop applications for reading because I can’t share their data files between work and home, meaning that I read stuff twice. Web-based aggregators: there don’t seem to be many, or many good ones at all (correct me if I’m wrong here, please), so I wrote my own. However, this is a really boring project, so I haven’t got the inclination to hack newsfeed categorisation into it. I am still thinking about a newspaper-style UI for RSS reading, and I’ve got a couple of ideas, but it’s a big project and every time I think about it I feel guilty about all the other big projects I haven’t done yet.
I do something similar with my bookmarks (I prefer to read most sites in their native environment, if i have time).My “blogs” folder is split up into: daily, 2-3 days, weekly, the rest and new. The best stuff gets put into daily, the stuff that is updated infrequently or that I only have a passing interest in goes towards the bottom end. If anything goes months without getting updated, it’ll likely be removed.By shuffling maybe once a week, I get quite a good set of posts.
39 minutes later
Yep, SharpReader it is. You can categories your feeds, set the default refresh rate for them etc. Because I can use the company VPN to get access to my work computer at home, I’ve got a fairly simple batch job to copy over the SharpReader data. It seems to work, but I’d prefer a web based one too.What I’ve written is very simple so far, and because SharpReader is so good, there is no impetus for me to continue. AmphetaDesk with AmphetaOutlines was the best web based one I found, but it didn’t do certain things that I like in SharpReader (categories for example) and had a number of other odd features I ended up not liking.
39 minutes later