31 March 2011 RSS blindness
I subscribe to a LOT of RSS feeds. Far too many. The problem with this is that I read all the posts in Reeder (on Mac and iPhone) and I end up missing the carefully considered context of each blog's actual design. Given that the bulk of my subscriptions are to design blogs, this seems a little counter-productive, doesn't it?
Sometimes I'll step out of Reeder and onto a site I read all the time, only to notice that it's had a radical makeover (for example, a recent visit to Creative Journal was a surprising treat). I've spent hours hacking away at the code to redesign my own site, so it strikes me as an odd paradox that new readers get to see this, but those who have chosen to subscribe to the RSS feed (gawd bless you), are missing out on it completely. All those little widgets on the right that aid the reader in navigating the site and discovering other posts and other blogs and things: completely absent.
Loyalty is rewarded with an inferior reading experience. Style is traded for convenience. Function for brevity. RSS is certainly one of the best things to happen to the web, but at times it does seem to be working against it.
Reader Comments (5)
Totally agree. Sometimes it's good to get your head from out of your RSS.
I've categorised all of my RSS feeds into "General", "Online Marketing", "Creative" and "Typography" (ignore the distinction between the latter two, there are just far too many in "Creative" for me to want to add another 15). What I tend to do when I'm reading the feeds, is to cmd-click the titles of the ones I know will be nicer to read online (such as this site) and then cmd-click any of the ones that appear to take me any longer than about 5 minutes to read.
That's the very reason I stay clear of RSS myself. Instead, I create bookmark folder of all the sites I read through, open them all at once in tabs, and just work my way through each one, cmd-w-ing each one as I've read it.
Pretty much sums up my habits, too.
The only site I’ve given regular exception to is Jason Santa Maria’s, since every post of his has been given separate, considered treatment, so that, in a way, the content of his posts are far more than just the words and pictures he posts there.
That said, now that an iPad2 has found its way into our domicile, the lack of Helvetireader, and the fact that regular websites just feel so damn right on the beast, has found me straying out of RSS more and more…
Reeder for Mac has a very easy way to view content as originally intended though. Just hit the right arrow key (or swipe right if you have a multi-touch trackpad) and it'll show that feed item in the built-in browser view. Hit left and it'll go back to the standard stripped-down view. It makes it very quick and easy to view those nicely designed sites as intended while still having a list of unread items and the ability to read those not-as-nicely designed sites in plain stripped-down RSS reader mode. It's not perfect, sometimes it can't display websites properly, but it's definitely the best I've seen of trying to bridge the RSS and web experience, anyway.