State of RSS Readers
blog.superfeedr.com
blog.superfeedr.com
Google reader was perfect for that, and it was only on occasion that I used their web interface. Most of the time I was on my iPad/iPhone/Android (using Reeder/Byline/Flipboard and the official android client)
Reeder supports FeedAFever mentioned in the article, so I think I'm going to try that.
Wishes, horses, riding beggars, &c.
One of my biggest kvetches is that while I can rename feeds in the browser, the API exposes no way to get the name I give the feed, or to set it.
(Just thinking out loud)
Maybe just a script that can run occasionally and dump the new items as a single HTML page (plus another file with state info) into Dropbox.
http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_dat...
Google giving away their product for free effectively prevented a working market - nobody could make money selling a feed-aggregator.
With Google out of the way, there will hopefully be money sloshing around, and users who now realise how much they want this kind of service (and are prepared to pay for it).
Agree Reader exit still creates a nice niche for others to fill since even if G+ is the goal not all folks will go G+ if there are more focused alternatives.
IMHO, feed reading should be integrated into the browser as a tab, not in the hands of commercial interests. But that's an aside.
This is a really interesting idea. Has there been any talk in Chrome development about building a browser-side RSS reader? Google would still get all the information they get from Reader now but they'd be making the 'feature' exclusive to their browser. This coming not long after Apple removed their feed managing ability in the web browser, meaning they could get a load of Chrome converts on OS X just from that.
It'd be really interesting to see what happened if browser-side RSS became "the thing" again. Although, as julien pointed out, doing it browser-side doesn't necessarily mean your RSS isn't in the hands of a commercial interest.
Opera has a feed reader, too, but I never really found it to be as usable as Thunderbird or Akregator (neither of which I really like.)
It's not a GUI app or web-based, which are both plusses to me. It's also neither closed-source, nor spyware (like way too many web-based readers are).
Newsbeuter is relatively feature rich and has a decent enough interface. I'm pretty happy with it, and prefer it to the closest Linux terminal RSS reader competitor that I've found, Snownews.[2]
The main problems with it is that when feeds get large (1000+ articles), reading that feed gets to be pretty slow. This is a long-standing performance bug that has not been fixed in years. But, apart from that, if you're reading feeds with a reasonable number of article in them, it's great.
This file could be stored on a server or in a user's Dropbox folder. It would allow users to pick an RSS reader freely (per platform), without losing and rebuilding all their data. It also keeps all this metadata in sync, one less worry for the developers.
Don't get me wrong. I totally agree w/ you and wish that switching is easier. That "cost of switching", though, is the primary reason I'm still using the reader that I am (and have been for years).
A rising tide lifts all boats. If something is developed that makes the entire ecosystem more attractive, then everybody benefits.
I'm guessing that most of the developers want you to use their reader and I'm not sure there's an advantage (for them) in adding code that makes it easier for you to switch to another product.
Sure there is... because I'm more likely to try your product in the first place if I know I'm not locked into it. "The best way to capture users is to make it easy for them to leave" and all that.
I use a self hosted and rather hacked up rnews install: http://rnews.sourceforge.net/
It uses magpierss to grab feeds: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
I also make heavy use of yahoo pipes to munge together a few rss feeds and do other regex'y type things to a feeds: http://pipes.yahoo.com (pls yahoo, never kill pipes!)
The reason I like rnews is the boxed layout (where each feed is seperated), rather than every other rss reader which jams everything into a single feed. With the boxed way I have the feeds I read daily up top and then progressively have boxes for sites which I only skim headlines for every week down lower.
I have a side question which I've been meaning to float on HN for some time: is there anything cool I could do with the fact that my self hosted rss aggregator receives roughly 2,000 hits a day from search bots? I mean I get scraped constantly all day, from ALL engines.
Pretty surprising.
* EC2
No referral links here, but I am on Gittip :P
Number of times something has happened to make an old desktop app stop working: numerous
for example (I haven't experienced all of these):
- switching from Windows -> Mac - having my hard drive fail and finding out my backups were broken - OSX upgrades breaking backwards compatibility (ie, old binary format) - having my laptop stolen - switching jobs, requiring me to give my laptop back - having multiple devices that I like to read news on (ie, phone, laptop, tablet)
I much prefer to have as little as possible tied to the hunk of metal my sweaty fingers type on. I haven't lost any data yet from using 'cloud services' and the GR replacement I pick will be well vetted.
Unless you use web apps for absolutely everything, you're still going to have to make backups. And if you're making backups anyway, how hard is it to include a tiny little list of RSS feed URLs which can be used to pick up from where you left off with any RSS reader, should anything happen?
Anyway, if you screw up your backups, you've got far more serious problems than simply restoring an RSS feed list. Do a good job on backups, and the rest mostly falls in to place.
If I close my laptop for the weekend, that means I lose most of those entries in my reader.
That being said, I did make a simple ruby script to email me articles when an RSS feed gets updated. I did this mainly to help me keep tabs on service availability RSS feeds, i.e. Twitter's status RSS, Facebook's status RSS, Amazon AWS stratus RSS, and my local weather advisory RSS. It comes in very handy. Maybe I'll put the script on GitHub.
My news reader is my go-to "I have a few minutes" thing, so I use it equally from desktop/laptop, phone, iPad and so on. I don't want to spend any effort clearing each source of articles I've read on another.
With Google Reader you could have that sync between RSS Readers because you were using Reader as backend, but now?
Also the extremely annoying variability of rss feeds is still not handled by many rss parsers, especially the php world misses on this. python ok with feed parser.
One more thing: waste of energy duplicating rss feeds a zillion times - just to be deleted in most cases.
Seems to be a good usecase for a cool pyramid app on a deduplicating filesystem - what are your plans for the weekend?
It's a news aggregator that adapts to your interests. Articles that users liked are anonymously shared with others having similar interests.
So far I'm thinking of using a river for my "firehose" feeds while using newsblur (or something) to keep tabs on my "must read" feeds.
I played around with Dave Winer's OPML Editor/River2 but it just never clicked for me.
i'm really very sad right now.