Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

i don't use feeds. I like visiting actual sites. In firefox, i have a bookmarks folder called "daily read" and i open its contents in tabs.

I ask because I currently have about 100 feeds in Google Reader; most of them update fairly infrequently. I try to only subscribe to feeds that have full text, since I dislike excerpts because I have to open a new tab. That said, I try to read all my feeds, but often fall behind (260 unread at the moment). I find catching up takes too long and I just have to press 'Mark All as Read.'

Perhaps I need to adjust my approach to feeds to maximize my information/time; I tend to cycle between subscribing to many feeds and then unsubscribing from many. My biggest trouble is with feeds that are high volume (1 post/day or more) yet have interesting content. These can be enormous timesinks if I'm not careful.

Generally? I don't. Until I can get such information via feeds, presented nicely and in an aggregatable way, I will just visit individual sites.

There are ~300 feeds where I skim all the posts and ~20 that are a must read in a separate bucket on google reader. Feeds are so critical to what I do that I have to keep up with them even after a vacation. Which means ~1000 messages in the "inbox" from time to time. There are ~100 other feeds that I wish I had time to read, but unfortunately their volume is too high for me to keep up.

Really want to change that, so there's no fixed "inbox", but the posts that are critical should bubble up to top, and the rest should only be findable with specific topic searches.

I use irssi (CLI Linux IRC client) for a ton of things -- it's basically my dashboard -- and have eventually hit upon the strategy of running an rbot (a Ruby infobot-alike by linuxbrit) and using its RSS plugin to monitor about 60 feeds in a private channel. It sits in a separate irssi window along with IRC, email, AIM, and stocks, and is nice because I can use irssi's controls (or rbot's) to do things like highlighting or ad-hoc scripting.

These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.

I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored.

Currently I use rojo, although I heard they are undergoing a transformation (new name, etc.). I think theres a lot of room for improvement in the RSS reader space, but they currently offer the best type of reader from what i've seen out there.

I track around 30 feeds (news / high frequency) on Firefox Live Bookmarks on a daily basis.

I also track around 800 feeds (opinion / lower frequency) on Netvibes on a weekly / biweekly basis.

left to right

I use Bloglines because their mobile versions (simple mobile version and iPhone version) are superior to Google Readers. I have 114 feeds divided up into folders by interest area. Some folders like "Development", "Design" and "Competitors" are higher priority reads. I have a few top-level feeds that aren't in folders that are the highest priority.

I use Opera's feed reader at present, but mainly because I read some cookie-protected feeds and an in-browser one seems like the best solution. I keep a pretty tight leash on the feeds I subscribe to (twelve or so at the moment), and delete any I ignore for several days.

I use Apple Mail. It shows individual feeds as if they were a mailbox, all grouped under and RSS container. Unfortunately, this keeps me addicted to HN throughout the day rather than just once or twice a day.

By not having a RSS reader, I can lie to myself and say that I'm not that addicted to technology news/blogs. By not having sites bookmarked, it makes me put a little effort into visiting sites like MacRumors, techmeme, etc.

I'm embarrassed to say that not once, but several times, I've collect loads of feeds and then rarely made good on reading them all.

The stuff I was interested in would change over time, so I was left with feeds I wasn't so interested in anymore. I tried different feedreaders. And I would always feel overwhelmed when I saw 4,283 unread messages.

So I'm back trying it again with a "must read" folder in Google Reader and only putting feeds in that I definitely want to read.

But when I do subscribe and am committed to reading, I try to make an effort to at least open every post and start reading it.

Strange, this thread is full of luddites who don't use RSS!

Anyway, I use Google Reader. I tend to read everything I subscribe to. If I don't read it, I unsubscribe to it after I've ignored it long enough. I have maybe 30-40 subscriptions, all to sites that post infrequently, so I rarely have more than a handful of articles unread.

I get a lot of interesting articles via Hacker News too, and also via Google-Reader recommendations (one of GReader's killer features imho).

Top to bottom, left to right.

Seriously, I'm subscribed to about 40 feeds, but I usually don't even start my feed browser because it's a time sink.

The S/N ratio with most blogs isn't very high, but I subscribe just to get that occasional important nugget of information/insight.

But I am coming to the realization that RSS is a bit of a distraction - if I start my RSS reader, I feel obliged to read everything just to get rid of the 'unread' icon. It doesn't really help me build great stuff.

I'm using Google Reader for mostly personal blogs but visit sites like HN directly since they tend to clutter my whole feed reader. I had subscribed to the HN feed for a long time but since the feed displays every blog post that hits the frontpage there were a lot of uninteresting entries.

I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).

The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.

For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes).

At home, I use my web browser (OmniWeb) to put menus of feed items into my toolbar. This is good because I tend to be in my browser when viewing other news sites.

Yet at work, I use my E-mail (Thunderbird), perhaps because the RSS feeds tend to be blogs, newsgroups or other similar E-mail-like items.

In other words, my reader depends on the style of the content: is it E-mail-like, or web-like.

I use Google Reader, currently subscribed to 68 feeds and get around 250-300 posts per day. I read everything in expanded mode, though most of the time I'll just skim a headline and move on.

I have my feeds logically grouped into prioritized groups so that if I start to get a backlog of 500+ posts I will read my favorite blog from a given category then mark all as read to reduce the counts.

I use Google Reader to read about 200 feeds. But I've ruthlessly pruned anyone that

a) took too much absolute time (high volume, long posts - ie big news sites without targeted content)

b) too low signal to noise ratio (typically from someone that writes one popular posts that's a little outside their main topics) - Stuff White People like was on this - funny, not that funny, repetitive, too often. If it was once a week, I would have read it.

I read (see) probably 50 posts a day - anything more than that and I go back and prune some. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a day reading. It's my equivalent of watching TV. Here are the main categories:

Must reads - the Yegges, Grahams, Mosers, etc

High volume, quick reads - FAIL blog, Seth Godin

High volume, useful but not always great - SvN, CodingHorror, Joel

Low volume - product blogs, occasional bloggers

Sage a Firefox plugin, and sometimes Google Reader.

Bloglines.

129.

Read the most important ones, then eventually catch up on the other ones.

I'd go mad if I didn't read them selectively like this.

I use Opera's built-in feed reader. I like it. I have about 20 feeds subscribed, and I obsessively at least skim every article until it tells me there are zero unread.

Quite a pain on Monday (I don't read feeds on weekends) to come into work and have 50 new articles on Business of Software and Hacker News :P. Just one of those burdens I bear, I guess. I used to actually click through and read each and every HackerNews article, so I've improved somewhat from there. Little baby steps.

I use Planet ( http://www.planetplanet.org/ ), and only update it once a day, because Y HN is distracting enough!

I use NewsFire, subscribed to about 50-60 feeds. I skim through them (hit space) and if anything catches my eye I read them. If I'm not in the mood to read it, I flag it for later reading.

Every month or so I go through my feeds and only keep the ones that consistently have posts that catch my attention.

I'm subscribed to only about 15 feeds through Google Reader, which I refine every season according to signal/noise ratio. I'm also a big fan of Google Alerts, which I've found is a good way to find great articles that you wouldn't find in the echo chamber of most blogs, particularly those about programming.

Otherwise, I check HN and a couple other news sites. Most of the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and Google Alerts catches the good articles that don't get on the front page.