Three Tips on Tackling RSS
Three months ago, I put together a blog post that discussed the benefits and drawbacks of living without RSS, based on my own personal experience. After writing that post, I actually returned to my old ways and fired up Reeder once again. However, I embarked on a mission to extract the benefits of RSS while avoiding the pitfalls. Would I be able to get that smooth, consistent news-reading experience that RSS offers while still avoiding the stress that comes from having hundreds of unread stories to sift through? Ultimately, I found that while there is no perfect solution, and while the process of manually curating stories will always have a few advantages over RSS, there are three simple rules that you can follow in order to make RSS reading a less stressful experience.
1. Purge articles regularly: This one might be a little hard to accept at first. One of the big advantages of RSS is in its ability to give us an exhaustive list of every article on a given website. Some websites have layouts that are so counter-intuitive that the overlooking of important articles is almost an inevitability, and from that perspective, RSS seems like a great way to prevent that from happening. However, I have ultimately come to the realization that you simply cannot have it all unless you are willing to sacrifice your time and your sanity in order sift through hundreds of irrelevant stories in order to find the gems. If you want to avoid the stress that comes with curating an RSS feed, the best thing you can do is to set up a schedule for purging stories. For myself, I perform the purge once a week. Every week on Sunday evening (because I have nothing more exciting to do on Sunday evening), I take one final dive into my list of unread stores, and then I hit that “mark all as read” button in Reeder. In that one instant, hundreds of unread articles are obliterated, never receiving a chance to see the light of day (unless somebody tweets one of them). Essentially, this allows me to start the next week completely fresh, and it also allows me to deal with a list of feeds that never contains an overwhelming amount of articles (this past week was something of an exception, since all of the CES-related news pushed a ridiculous amount of detritus onto my plate).
2. Use a “read later” service: This is probably the most obvious suggestion of the three, but it’s important enough to warrant mentioning. When looking through your list of feeds, you have to move at a steady pace if you want to avoid having stories pile up on you (stories which will ultimately get purged if you don’t read them in time). Of course, some of the most interesting stories are also some of the most lengthy ones (Glenn Greenwald’s consistently excellent articles come to mind). Whenever I encounter a long article that looks like something I would want to read, I just hit that little Readability button at the top of Reeder, and just like that, I can move on with the knowledge that I have not turned my back on that potentially interesting article. There are plenty of “read later” service out there nowadays (Instapaper, Read It Later, and Evernote Clearly are three examples of alternate services that perform the same function), but Readability happens to be my personal favourite. Apart from having full Reeder support, I love how Readability can be configured to send a daily digest to my Kindle. This allows me to establish a solid workflow where the “curating” and “reading” aspects of the RSS experience are kept separate. While I am at work, I spend my breaks going through my RSS feeds without reading anything in a great amount of detail. I take potentially interesting stories and send them to Readability, which in turn sends those stories to my Kindle in the form of a daily digest. Once I leave work, run my errands, walk my dog, and get back from the gym, I can sit down on my couch with my Kindle and read through all of those interesting stories that I was tagging throughout the day. It’s like having a newspaper that is comprised entirely of content that you selected. The separation of curation and in-depth reading has helped my own personal sanity level, and I would recommend that system to anybody who has ever felt that they are not receiving an enriching reading experience.
3. Limit the amount of feeds that you subscribe to: Again, this suggestion seems to run counter to the very idea behind RSS, but I have personally found it to be quite important. The specific number of feeds in your list is going to depend on your own personal situation (specifically, how much time you have and how much time you are willing to spend), but subscribing to one-hundred different feeds is counter-productive regardless of how much free time you have available. As of right now, I have about twenty feeds in my list, because I know that I can’t conceivably handle more than that in a given week. When looking at a website and contemplating whether or not to add it to your subscription list, you should ultimately ask yourself “does this website produce enough good material on a consistent basis to justify adding them to my list?”. Your should treat your list of RSS feeds like an exclusive club that only the best of the best can belong to. For the websites that don’t make the cut, you can always hope that their strong material makes it onto your Twitter feed. Actually, I almost think of Twitter and RSS as two equally important news sources that compliment each other. RSS gives me the news from my tried and true sources while Twitter gives me interesting articles from places that I typically don’t visit on a daily basis. As of right now, I have about twenty unread articles in my Readability list, and I am willing to bet that about half of them have come from Twitter. Your RSS reader should be a collection of the best websites, not an exhaustive list of all websites.
Hopefully the advice given here will prove useful to some people. I don’t profess to be a master of productivity by any stretch of the imagination, and I am always learning new ways to be more productive and more enriched (those two things are not mutually inclusive by any means). With that in mind, perhaps I will have to write a follow-up post in a few months time if my workflow changes.
My Random Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
I have had my Kindle for a little over a month now, and it has been serving me quite well in that span of time. Keep in mind that this is not one of the new devices that Amazon announced back in September. Rather, this is the older, black model with the physical keyboard. Still, I figured I would post some thoughts on the device, for those of you who are on the fence about possibly buying one. Besides, the older model has been rebranded as the Kindle Keyboard, and it’s still available for purchase (though for how long is anybody’s guess).
Positives
Amazing battery life: I had heard about the Kindle’s notoriously great battery life in the past, but it still managed to impress me nonetheless. I’ve had the device for a little over a month now, and with an average of 30 minutes of usage a day, my battery meter is still roughly at the halfway mark. In my view, that one advantage alone pretty much makes the Kindle worth buying alongside a tablet that you already own. I’ve been contemplating buying an iPad 2 for a while now (I should be able to scratch enough cash together by the end of the semester), but I can definitely see myself using the two devices side-by-side. I can read my books on the Kindle without having to worry about draining the battery. You can’t really say the same about the iPad, since the vast majority of the battery power on a tablet goes towards powering the actual screen (though I suppose that depends on what you’re actually doing). Obviously if you’re not the type of person who reads a lot, it might not make sense to buy both, but for the particularly voracious readers among us, I don’t see the whole “tablet vs e-reader” competition as a competition at all. With the battery life factor in play, I see the two devices co-existing.
Comfortable to hold: I ended up buying one of those leather cases for my device, and even with the case on the Kindle, it’s still really light and comfortable to hold for long stretches of time (keeping in mind that a “long stretch of time” for me is about two hours). I definitely can’t see myself reading for that long on an iPad, and in many instances it’s even more comfortable than reading a physical book. I’m pretty fanatical about making sure that my physical books don’t get damaged, and so I always hold them with the utmost care. You really don’t have to worry about that with the Kindle. No worries about bending pages, deforming the edges of the jacket, or damaging the spine. Nice.
Easy to load non-Kindle store books: One of the things I was worried about when purchasing the Kindle is how “locked down” it would be. As it turns out, loading books that weren’t purchased from the Kindle Store is really easy. If the book is in the mobi format, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping the file into your Kindle (which thankfully just mounts as an external drive when plugged in to your computer). If the book is in ePub format, you have to convert it first, but I found that Calibre got the job done really nicely. And the books that I loaded in this manner still had all of the Kindle’s functionality intact - I could easily move between chapters, I could get dictionary definitions for words, and so forth. Now obviously I’m not encouraging people to illegally download books. Reading is sadly not a very popular activity in today’s world, and so authors need all the help that they can get. That being said, there are often instances when a book is not in print anymore and not available for purchase on the Kindle store. Cases like this leave you with few options.
Looks great in outdoor conditions: This is something that has been discussed at lengths by people far more intelligent than myself, so I’ll keep it brief. Living in Edmonton, we don’t have very many opportunities to get some outdoor reading in (perhaps a five month window, five and a half in a good year), but I was able to put the Kindle through the paces while my dog was running around in the backyard, and it got the job done nicely.
Negatives
Kindle Store availability depends on region: Imagine my unpleasant surprise when the very first book that I searched for in the Kindle Store was not available. I was honestly dumbfounded for about twenty minutes (“did I put the wrong search parameters in? Am I searching in the right place? Is my Kindle broken?”) before eventually realizing that just because a book is available for purchase in Canada, that doesn’t necessarily mean that its Kindle equivalent is available in Canada. Furthermore, just because the Kindle version of a book is available in the United States, that doesn’t mean that it will be available in Canada. It still makes very little sense to me how the physical version of a book can be available in Canada, but the Kindle equivalent is not (despite the fact that it is available in the US, so the digital version obviously exists). I didn’t think such a unnecessarily confusing system could exist, but such is the case for two books that I searched for (The Wise Man’s Fear and A People’s History of the United States, though the former is now available thankfully), and I’m sure that many other books fall into this category.
Viewing angles aren’t always great: Not a huge deal, but one of the problems with having a screen and no backlight is that you will sometimes find yourself shifting around in your chair to find the right angle to read in. Physical books don’t have this problem because there is no screen that light can reflect off of, and the iPad doesn’t have this problem because the backlight overpowers all but the most severe sources of reflection. The screen on the Kindle is a matte screen, and so thankfully you don’t get any severe reflections, but when you don’t have a backlight, it doesn’t take a severe reflection to make the device difficult to read. The key is to position the device so that the light source is directly shining on the screen, as opposed to a wide angle, where the light reflects off. It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound, but it’s still something to keep in mind.
Slightly worried about the durability: I suppose this is one point that will be hard to comment on at this time (again, I’ve only had the device for about a month), but the fact that my sleep switch is already sticking does concern me a little bit. It’s the same sort of sliding switch that you have on the PSP, and I’ve heard quite a few horror stories about those things wearing down and breaking, which obviously leaves you in a difficult situation. Still, I guess if you wanted to look on the bright side, the new version only costs $99, so if disaster were to strike, you have an easy path to replacing your Kindle (or you can always repair it if you’re savvy).
So like I said off the top, the Kindle has been serving me quite well in the albeit limited time that I have owned it. It’s probably important to reiterate that I’m basing my observations off of the old Kindle (the third generation), but I can’t imagine that the new versions are drastically different. The biggest differences are the form factor, the loss of the keyboard, and some improved refresh rates (and even the old refresh rates don’t bother me, so I think you’re okay regardless). Hopefully this little write up is helpful for people who are on the fence about possibly purchasing a Kindle.
