Comments on: To RSS or not RSS

By: Czar

Czar — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:35:17 +0000

My outlook about these news/RSS aggregators is indeed very different from yours. For me, using these stuffs doesn’t suck me. They are indeed excellent tools in sharing information from your website.

I am so contented about it and I don’t intend to omit it…unless there’s a better one coming up.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:23:04 +0000

I use a news aggregator to read my RSS feeds. I use to visit the old fashion way but cut down on that. Any forum I read as well the first thing I do is look for their rss feed if they have one. This way I can keep up to date with the latest posts. Some forums are better with RSS than others. I recently switched over to newsgator online for managing my RSS feeds. It polls all the feeds and handles them on their servers which I like as I don't have to worry about leaving on my computer or anything like that. Then I use their RSS plugin for outlook (instead of the outlook built in rss reader) and it will sync all my feed's including the read items to their server. On my blackberry I also have a client where I can read my feeds and it as well sync's with the online account. In the end, whatever I read is sync'd to everything and I can clip articles for later so I can read them in more depth when I get back to my computer. Its actually very useful. And if I happen to miss anything on one feed more than likely I will see it on another. We all know that any apple news hits every feed within 10 minutes.

By: Sam Curren

Sam Curren — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:29:17 +0000

Checking on 15 sites takes you 45 minutes? I'd never waste that much time. I suspect most of your techs don't use readers because they are trying to kill time, not gather useful information. Not only does a reader help keep me current on less frequently updated (but very valuable) websites, it allows me to quickly sift through updates on sometimes noisy sites. I almost always click through to read the article on the original site, which helps me with article context. If you have built good article scanning skills, then they would be put to very good use in a feed reader. The keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader make this process both fast and painless. Feed Readers might not be for everyone, but I'd set the bar much lower then you. If you regularly visit more then 3 websites (and are looking for information and not killing time) then you would benefit from a feed reader.