Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I don't actually use RSS for news, because all the regularly updating sites I read fall into four categories:

- News sites like HN or LWN, where I find the RSS experience quite suboptimal compared to participating directly.

- Blogs, which I read entirely via Planet aggregators: Planet Debian, Planet GNOME, Kernel Planet, and Planet Mozilla.

- Comics, serialized stories, and other things where I want to read every page and remember what I haven't read. For these, I use Comic Rocket (https://www.comic-rocket.com/), which a friend and I wrote years ago. Every one of the comics you mentioned is tracked there, along with XKCD's What If.

(That's in addition to mailing lists, which includes announcement lists, and Twitter, which also covers things like This Week In Rust.)

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I actually find RSS more valuable for sites that do not update often. You know, that one blog from an incredible guy who posts five times a year, or from a friend of yours who post a project update even now and then.

I also subscribe for sites that update very often, such as Hack a Day, so I can scan the headlines and sort very fast what I want to save for later (GTD style). For this, I use newsblur keyboard shortcuts.

I tend to use Comic Rocket for those rarely-updating sites too; anything with a next link works. For instance, I read http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ that way, and several other things that update even less often (a few times a year).

Every time I try an RSS reader, I find myself drowning in things I don't actually care to read in their entirety. And I prefer to read almost everything on the original site, rather than in a newsreader.

The trouble with your approach (mixing everything into time-sorted feeds) is that you are more likely to see high-volume posters. You're more likely to miss out on low-velocity but high-quality sources. I've written indirectly about this before: http://akkartik.name/post/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc. But that was a long time ago. These days I don't care about relevance or personalization. I just make sure that I diversify my personal reading regardless of what the world around me is putting into its brain: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml. There's almost 250 sources in there, but it generates 2-3 posts a day that I don't ever want to miss.

A recent thread with tons of recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563516.

I stopped using RSS readers after the demise of Google Reader & my shift to Twitter. But I can't live without these sites which take me almost to all the placed on the net :) HackerNews- Daily morning read, can't live without it. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters :) Techmeme - A river of news to read corporate tech news. Kottke - I am not kidding, I read it daily to impress my 8 year old daughter - from Pixar to movies to planet discoveries. Techdirt - Interesting debates on tech policies. Edge.org - If you really have good supply of Coffee & very solid conversations.

Enjoy.

What's LWH ?

LWN: https://lwn.net/ . Best source for FOSS news; next best thing to reading all of the Linux Kernel mailing list and many other first-hand sources, as well as reports from numerous conferences.

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