I did exactly what you describe for years: skimming the headlines of my few high-volume subscriptions and marking everything as read. Even doing that was a waste of time because of those feed's very low signal-to-noise ratio. Besides those few high-volume feeds, I subscribed to dozens of low-volume feeds which all added to the chore/bore.
Skimming and picking my daily feeds usually took close to 2 freaking hours to which I added the time required to read and act upon the very few interesting items (following a couchdb tutorial takes time).
Back in 2007, IIRC, I even started work on my own feed reader (progrss.net, never went live) designed around a cool algorhythm that would filter items according to keyword frequency and manual tagging. It looked good and was an interesting change of direction UX-wise (it was less "app-y" and more "publish-y", whatever that means) but I burned out on RSS in the middle of my project's 3rd iteration.
Seriously, opening my reader (even my own prototype) in the morning and being greated by 1200 or so items was just incredibly tiring. Even with working filters.
Really, following RSS feeds was a colossal time-sink for me and switching back to the old way (consulting a few key sites daily) allowed me to focus a lot more on both my work and my familly.
When ever I get around to it, that is what I'm going to try. I've heard good things about it. and if it works, I'll never have to worry about switching again.
It is... OK. Works pretty well if you don't have a large number of feeds. If you do, can require some decent hardware to run well. Probably not a big deal for most people here, but I got tired of administering it and switched to NewsBlur.
Some of my performance issues could have been MySQL tuning issues, but I just got tired of tinkering with it.
I haven't switched yet. What I would like to have is the reader that is basically the same as the old good Google Reader:
- be web based
- be cross platform (so I can use it on phone and desktop)
- be light on network and fast to load
- have simple design
- should have folders
- sort by oldest
- mark all as read (in the folder)
- be optimized for text, not pictures
and that's pretty much all.
What it shouldn't have is:
- fancy design
- too much pictures
- ads
- unused empty space
- feed discovery and any "social" features
Of course, it should also be free.
In the end, I might just as well backup my feed list for the reference, but try to live without RSS reader for a month or two, just to check do I really want to switch to another one.
In the end, I might even consider some lightweight self hosted variant.
I've tried quite a few and am now on NewsBlur. It's not perfect but it's the closest I've seen to your list (which was also my list of priorities too).
There are some weird behaviour differences unfortunately. The most annoying one for me is that scrolling past an unread story marks it as read automatically... but overall, yes. It's basically closer to the original GR than anything else I've seen.
Interesting. It seems they keep the old behaviour for people with older accounts. I never had to turn it off in the original GR and never got the behaviour either.
Donation. It's not a business, so much as a group of geeks who wanted to bring back the heyday of GR. You can Flattr or bitcoin I think, and they've managed to keep a steady influx of donations thus far. By definition, it's easy to maintain since the goal of the project is "no additional features". So, the main cost is server load, which these days is easy enough to manage.
I was hoping that was the case for me, but their mobile version is nearly useless to me. I want a compact view of titles that I can expand to read what I want, since I really only want to read about 50% of the posts in my feeds.
With The Old Reader, I get to either choose between having everything expended or a list view that only shows the first 3 or 4 words of the title on my phone.
No offense meant to The Old Reader folks, they're not obliged to please me... I'm just venting... and hoping what I want actually exists :)
Alternatively, "Of course, I should pay a small amount of money so I have to worry considerably less about the possibility of someone pulling the plug on it leaving me in the same situation again."
Your mileage might vary but once a service is established as important to me I'm almost keen to pay money to support it.
I agree with you on this, but I said in the comment that one of the alternatives I consider is not using any reader, so it should be pretty obvious that I don't consider out critical enough to warrant even a small payment.
I've been working on this solution and am currently in a closed beta. Will be opening up this/next week over time. http://hivereader.com I meet all your requirements but the cross platform. Once the web API's are locked (aka near the 1st) I am going to start cranking on the mobile app ASAP as well as a public facing api. I also have social but you don't need to use it. (no really, it's barely there).
Still waiting and watching here. My setup is a desktop reader (Feed Demon) synced with Google reader. I have found no viable alternatives yet. Most seem to be concentrating only on web-based alternatives and desktop aggregators are left in the dust. I am not online all the time. Personally I'm waiting to see which provider RSSOwl will end up using for sync, although the prospect of using a Java GUI app is never appealing.
Like many, I've found myself using RSS less and less over the years, but it's still a handy way to keep up with sites that don't update frequently (whereas TechCrunch, say, is more easily followed on Twitter or e-mail due to the heavy flow).
But after trying a ton, I've switched to NewsBlur. Why? It's basically Google Reader done right. So many of the others try to be rather different to Reader or go overboard with 'social' features and that's not what I want, so as a near facsimile of the Reader model, NewsBlur gets my vote.
I tried NewsBlur. It seems a little bit heavy and over-designed to me. But my main problem with it is that any news items more than 2 weeks old are automatically marked as "read".
Given that the source is available (https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur), I sincerely hope that some kind soul will patch this and let us config the "mark as read" aging function, either by days or ability to just turn it off.
I switched to Feedly, though I had actually been using it long before I had to switch (it was basically just a frontend to google reader). It isn't missing any features I need so I can't complain. The android app works and syncs as expected. No complaints.
I switched to following Twitter accounts from the websites I subscribed to. It isn't as nice since I'm not incentivized into clicking the whole story (as I would oftentimes read the body anyway in Google Reader), but it fits into my "procrastination flow" and allows me to get related comments from Twitter at the same time as the story.
Newsblur, I'm not overly happy or anything, but it works.
What I'd really like is some kind of RSStalking with heavily filtered social networking built in.
I've unfollowed a multitude of feeds since switching to newsblur though. I think it might be because of the face that it's harder to categorize the feeds in newsblur and I've started reading feed by feed. The ones with a couple of posts that I don't want to read quickly get unfollowed.
I started to switch everything (cloud stuff, Android) to open source that I can host myself in case I need to in the future.
I've switched to Owncloud, hosted at Hetzner. It was really easy to install and does pretty much everything I want (RSS reader, Dropbox clone, contacts, calender, Google Music clone).
I tried Newsblur, but the interface was too complicated for my taste and the Android app was not very stable.
I started with Feedly, but realized there is no OPML export, which locks me in. This Reader situation taught me to not be locked in ever again. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced the transition from the Google backend is going to be smooth, and I don't care for the interface. The Chrome extension also runs in the background and keeps my LastPass authentications open, a huge, huge security risk. I have since switched to The Old Reader, which has thus far been perfect for my needs. I like that it's once again a centralized website I can access anywhere.
That's a really good point. I would recommend upvoting the suggestions at their uservoice site. They're actively listening, although I'm sure they're busy. In fact, I believe the uservoice voting is one of the primary reasons Feedly is headed to Windows Phone 8.
I really like the Feedly iOS interface for reading, but the app needs some work before it's any good as a primary feed aggregator. The main issue is that it forgets the Google authentication after a few days, even after an update which claimed to fix that issue. That doesn't fill me with confidence that the transition to their backend will be as smooth as they claimed.
Agreed, the extension was very invasive and broke Chrome in many frustrating ways. Memory usage was also off the charts, and that's not something I usually pay much attention to in a browser. I'll try Yoleo, I had not heard of that.
This, totally. They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick. I really don't understand the rationale here. What does a plugin platform give them that a simple website does not, if not additional tracking behavior? Does their monetization strategy involve selling data?
Actually creating an add-on allowed a lot more than offering a simple web-site. Remember Feedly is not new, it's been out there for years. Back then, offering an add-on allowed them to lower the stress on their platform by allowing most of the network trafic to be directly between your browser and google's servers. Now they have migrated on their own Cloud platform, they will probably very soon offer a plain site version without the need for add-ons.
"They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick" ... well their are 2 things there: packaging add-ons for multiple platforms is not difficult. You create some kind of packaging wrapper code around a common codebase. It's building a codebase which works on many javascript and DOM engines that takes time and effort. So building a "responsive website" (that works on most browsers) is not much "easier" than packaging custom app for each browser.
I've basically done the same thing, going through Feedly to The Old Reader (TOR). The only downside to TOR at the moment is it seems to take a while to update the feeds, forcing me to manually hit the refresh button on the feeds I read more frequently.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThat's because you were doing it wrong; you probably subscribed to spammy high-volume feeds.
Protip: Don't do that.
But if there are some high-volume feeds you absolutely must subscribe to, try only reading the headlines and then marking the entire folder as read.
Skimming and picking my daily feeds usually took close to 2 freaking hours to which I added the time required to read and act upon the very few interesting items (following a couchdb tutorial takes time).
Back in 2007, IIRC, I even started work on my own feed reader (progrss.net, never went live) designed around a cool algorhythm that would filter items according to keyword frequency and manual tagging. It looked good and was an interesting change of direction UX-wise (it was less "app-y" and more "publish-y", whatever that means) but I burned out on RSS in the middle of my project's 3rd iteration.
Seriously, opening my reader (even my own prototype) in the morning and being greated by 1200 or so items was just incredibly tiring. Even with working filters.
Really, following RSS feeds was a colossal time-sink for me and switching back to the old way (consulting a few key sites daily) allowed me to focus a lot more on both my work and my familly.
Some of my performance issues could have been MySQL tuning issues, but I just got tired of tinkering with it.
In the end, I might just as well backup my feed list for the reference, but try to live without RSS reader for a month or two, just to check do I really want to switch to another one.
In the end, I might even consider some lightweight self hosted variant.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions.
With The Old Reader, I get to either choose between having everything expended or a list view that only shows the first 3 or 4 words of the title on my phone.
No offense meant to The Old Reader folks, they're not obliged to please me... I'm just venting... and hoping what I want actually exists :)
Those two things are mutually exclusive though, unless it's being run by someone with enough money not to care or it's self hosted.
Alternatively, "Of course, I should pay a small amount of money so I have to worry considerably less about the possibility of someone pulling the plug on it leaving me in the same situation again."
Your mileage might vary but once a service is established as important to me I'm almost keen to pay money to support it.
But after trying a ton, I've switched to NewsBlur. Why? It's basically Google Reader done right. So many of the others try to be rather different to Reader or go overboard with 'social' features and that's not what I want, so as a near facsimile of the Reader model, NewsBlur gets my vote.
What I'd really like is some kind of RSStalking with heavily filtered social networking built in.
I've unfollowed a multitude of feeds since switching to newsblur though. I think it might be because of the face that it's harder to categorize the feeds in newsblur and I've started reading feed by feed. The ones with a couple of posts that I don't want to read quickly get unfollowed.
I've switched to Owncloud, hosted at Hetzner. It was really easy to install and does pretty much everything I want (RSS reader, Dropbox clone, contacts, calender, Google Music clone).
I tried Newsblur, but the interface was too complicated for my taste and the Android app was not very stable.
Vote: https://feedly.uservoice.com/forums/192636-suggestions/sugge... Suggest: https://feedly.uservoice.com/forums/192636-suggestions
In the end I have moved to Yoleo, as it is a standalone web app and has a nicer interface.
I was just about to set up my own RSS server, but that seems unnecessary now.