rss

Google Reader has been the core of my on-line news reading life for a couple of years now. It’s a great tool for keeping up with a whole range of news sources that use RSS: I organize my feeds into categories (News, Literature, Bicycling, etc.), skim the lists of news articles from any computer since it’s all stored in “the cloud,” and use the “star” feature to keep a list of things that deserve more than a cursory read.

For all its back end power, though, Google Reader’s interface is a tad utilitarian. (It’s the sort of interface I would probably have designed myself–as my project manager says of my current work (the UI has, thankfully, been handed over to a more competent designer), “it takes a mother to love it.”) The design owes much to the e-mail model, with folders for each topic and a bold unread count. You can see at a glance what new articles are available in each category, and expand the folder to see what’s available for each feed in that category. Articles are listed in the right pane in chronological order, though you can choose to sort by “magic,” which uses an algorithm that takes personal habits in sharing/starring and article popularity into account.

The problem with this interface, at least for me, is that it invokes a sort of anxiety when I see large numbers in the unread count. It’s very much like an e-mail interface, and I dread a full e-mail inbox. I’ve occasionally sat up far later than I should browsing Google Reader articles in an attempt to get the count down to zero.

I recently discovered Feedly, a web site and browser plug-in alternative to Google Reader, via Adria Richards (whose “But You’re a Girl” site has been in my Minneapolis-area feeds category since she broke the story of the Norm Coleman campaign’s shoddy computer security practices, though she should really be in my technology category). For a couple weeks now I’ve been using Feedly as my primary RSS reader, and I’ve been very pleased with it.

Feedly is built on the Google Reader backbone; it uses your Google Reader subscriptions in generating its pages. It also adds some content of its own–Twitter feeds, YouTube links, Amazon shilling associate links–and organizes content into attractive and easy-to-read layouts. You can choose different layouts–a “magazine” layout with featured articles at the top, picture and video grids, or more utilitarian summaries–for each category or feed, allowing you to customize your reading to fit your content.

Reading content through Feedly is easy and enjoyable. The headlines are rendered as links; clicking on a link opens a modal window within the page that displays the item’s summary content (including embedded media, which can be played within the page if the embedding technology supports it); the window is dismissed with a “minimize” link. Feedly offers “Cover”, “Digest”, and “Latest” views that show the most recent content (using an algorithm that utilzes Google Reader’s “magic” to surface personalized features), and presents a view of each of your categories; customization options let you modify the layout, colors, and optional components (Twitter, Amazon, Flickr, and others). There’s even a “Feedly mini” option, which provides a floating toolbar on other browser pages that surfaces related content from Feedly, and provides tools for sharing pages on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader.

Best of all, the Feedly layout reduces that anxiety of a giant list of unread articles. It still provides you with a count of unread articles, overall and by category or feed, but it’s not as prominent as in Google Reader. Instead, the layout is geared toward bringing the most recent articles to the top, along with articles that are ranked high in the “magic” algorithm, so the most interesting and useful pieces are the most visible. I currently have some 3,000 unread articles in my collection of RSS feeds, but I’m not bothered at all by it because the information that I see on the page is so much more compelling.

The only drawback to that I can see to the Feedly service is that it’s delivered as a browser plugin. It’s available for Firefox, and in a limited fashion for Safari and Chrome, but not for Internet Explorer or Opera. Because it’s a plugin, it’s less “cloud-friendly” than Google Reader alone: I can’t access my Feedly page at a public terminal, for example, though I am able to use it seamlessly across the three computers (Ubuntu Notebook, Windows 7 laptop, and Windows XP laptop) that I use most often. In those rare cases where I do have to use a non-Firefox browser on a system I don’t control, Google Reader continues to be my choice for reading the news.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Furl as part of my Twitter “strategy.” I go through my RSS feeds a couple times a day, flagging the items that might be of interest to my Twitter followers with Furl’s easy-to-use bookmarklet and categorizing them according to the appropriate Twitter identity: Minnesota things for We Like It Here, poetry and Dickinson-related items for Daily Dickinson, and various odds and sods for my personal Twitter account. Then my good friends at twitterfeed take over, periodically sending the resulting RSS feeds to the appropriate Twitter zone.

Alas, no longer.

I went to add this lovely spring photograph to the We Like It Here feed, and the bookmarklet responded with an abrupt message about how Furl has been “absorbed” by something called Diigo. There was no warning that I saw that this was coming (the Furl blog has been silent since January 21, and the Twitter feed since January 6); it just happened. At least the notice was nice enough to include instructions on how to transfer my feed contents over to the new service, and the transfer was flawless, but it was an abrupt interruption to my workflow.

One of the things I liked about Furl was that it was bare bones and no-nonsense. If you want to have a categorized collection of bookmarks, stored on the web for easy access from any location and available as RSS feeds, with the ability to do some simple annotation, it was perfect. No voting, no “Digging,” no “friending,” just bookmarking.

Diigo seems to want to be more than that. Their front page announces that “reading is more fun with friends” (an assertion with which I beg to differ, being a proudly solitary reader), that “[y]ou are what you annotate” (actually, I’m not…), and gives me all sorts of opportunities to “meet people” and “join communities.” Honestly, I’ve met about as many people as I care to, and I don’t need another “social media” site to worry about; Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are sufficient for my curmudgeonly needs.

Still, Diigo did a good job of importing my bookmarks, and they have a nice enough Firefox plugin for doing the bookmarking, and they publish my collections as RSS. (I had to make each one public and set the sorting to be descending by date, but that was reasonable enough.) It’s an interruption, but not a catastrophe.

But there was still one more fly in the ointment: Diigo adds stuff the RSS items that I don’t especially want. I discovered that, in addition to the title and URL (which is all I really want), the feed coming over to Twitter included “Tags: no_tag Posted by: mhartford” on each item. With 140 characters allowed for each “tweet,” that’s an expensive chunk of useless information. (Incidentally: if my bookmark doesn’t contain any tags, wouldn’t it make sense that the who “Tags:” element be excluded from the RSS item? If I were writing the code, that’s what I’d do…)

Fortunately, there’s a good (and fun) solution: Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an online feed manipulation tool that can consume RSS, HTML snippets, web service output, and other kinds of content, perform operations on the incoming content, and emit the output as a new RSS feed (or as JSON, e-mail messages, or a chunk of PHP code, if one is so inclined). The resulting collection of actions and its output can then be saved and published.

I looked at the XML that Diigo spat out, and discovered that it had some blocks of HTML inside the description element that I wanted to get rid of:

<description>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/mhartford/no_tag' rel='tag'>no_tag</a>
</p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/mhartford'>mhartford</a></p>
</description>


By creating a Yahoo! Pipe pointing to the Diigo RSS URL, and passing it through a regex (“regular expression”) control, I was able to remove the offending crud. The regex control simply points at the description item, and asks Yahoo! Pipes to remove anything that matches <p.*></p>. Hey presto! And it’s clean.

A useful side effect of the Yahoo! Pipes approach is that I’ve essentially created a proxy service for my RSS feeds. If I should have to migrate again, or otherwise fiddle with the output, I don’t have to point my feed readers or twitterfeed to another URL: I can continue to point to Yahoo! Pipes and make drastic changes invisible to consumers.

I’m still waiting to be impressed by Diigo; I don’t have any particular interest in the social media aspects of it, and I worry that if that component doesn’t grab traction in an increasingly over-”friended” online world, the useful aspects will be lost when Diigo goes under. I’ll continue to look for a Furl replacement.

But Yahoo! Pipes impresses me to no end. It’s easy and fun to work with (you drag controls around and string them together in a nice UI), powerful as heck but simple to use. I expect it to be a key piece of my arsenal of tools for taming the Internet’s ever-expanding river of content.