On the Road to RSS-ville
This weekend I decided to take the plunge, and tinkered with my first RSS feed reader. I downloaded aKregator, an RSS/Atom feed reader for KDE. So far, I’m quite impressed. I’ve added a few standard news sites that I read: Slashdot, CBC, OSNews, Wired, etc., along with a few friends’ LiveJournals and blogs. It couldn’t have been easier.
aKregator seems quite good, despite being a 1.0 beta. It hasn’t crashed, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to. It’s not terribly pretty to look at, and as a replacement for reading flashy web sites, I feel inundated by dull, flat text. More about this later. It also sits in my KDE system tray, polling all feeds every 30 minutes, and displaying the number of new, unread items.
Now I don’t need to keep loading various sites that I view on a daily basis in my browser; I can just sit back and let them come to me. Almost.
The problem is that not all RSS syndications give you any real content. For example, the KDE Dot News feed gives you a title and a link to the story. Not even a tagline! This is something I can somewhat understand from a commercial news site; after all, their revenue stream is usually from people viewing ads, and with RSS syndication, there aren’t any (thankfully!). But KDE Dot News is as non-profit as they get. And there are no ads. What gives?
Slashdot offers one of the better syndications. While you certainly can’t read an entire tree of 5+ moderated comments along with the story — you can, at the very least, read the actual story. Unfortunately, all links within the story are stripped out. I should point out that included with ALL feeds, their is always a link back to the original article, so one doesn’t have to go hunting down the real meat of the story.
Wired offers a tagline (and of course, a title). CBC offers no more than a title. How disappointing.
As for reading blogs, so far, it’s looking good. This means I don’t have to open a bunch of pages every couple days to see what folks are up to. And then remember where I finished reading. So, unless I want to read comments or see trackbacks, I can now even avoid viewing blogs entirely. (I should point out that some blog software offer comments for RSS syndication as well.)
So does all this actually save me time, or does it mean that I will actually be spending more time reading news and blogs and the like becuase it seems so much easier now? It’s too early to tell. So far, I haven’t had to refresh my stationary tab in Firefox with Slashdot as many times as I used to. And I also haven’t followed as many links from Slashdot to various places (because the links are gone in RSS!). All that being said, I’ve read more articles at places like Wired and CNet than I ever used to. And I will probably start following more blogs as a result, as well.
And as for the RSS-reading viewing web-reading experience: RSS is flat. There are no images, fancy fonts, or even colour. It’s entirley up to the RSS reader, and since RSS doesn’t include this sort of thing, there isn’t a whole lot for the reader to toy with. It would be nice (and I admit, I’m not at all familiar anymore with RSS standards) if there was a version that supported embedded links in the article body, as well as perhaps an image or two, if there was in the original piece.
