rss

There are 2 posts tagged rss (this is page 1 of 1).

Reeder 4 Initial Installation

For the longest time, I’ve consumed most of my (non-Twitter) news via RSS feeds. RSS feeds are an incredibly convenient way of bringing different newsfeeds from different websites and informations sources together.

I’ve experimented with different types of RSS readers over the years, and my favorites have been Digg, Unread, and more recently, I’ve switched back to Reeder 4 after hating it for years. Reeder is quick, and its new redesign makes it a lot more intuitive to use. The only annoyance with Reeder, however, is the exceptionally slow initial setup time. When you install it on a new device, it parses through the entire history of every news source – often accumulating up to 40,000 stories. And until it’s done with this initial startup, which can sometimes take hours, you cannot refresh to find new news stories.

I don’t seem to be able to find a way to restrict Reeder’s searches of news sources (or more technically the RSS XML files) to the last [x] number of entries. I thought I’d write this up in case someone else has faced a similar issue and has found a fix.

So long Digg Reader

RSS feeds are my crack cocaine – I spend hours a day on my feeds consuming news, information and everything in between. So the quality of my RSS reader is supremely important to me, and I’m really fussy about my reading experience.

When I read the Google Blog announcement that Google Reader would be discontinued in 2013, I remember feeling an acute sense of panic. I loved Google Reader for its simplicity, even if I had to suffer the Gmail-like interface (which I detest), and it was really convenient to run through a large number of feeds in short time. Other RSS readers like Newsblur, The Old Reader and Feedly were either too clunky or too undercooked at the time.

So Digg’s announcement about the launch of its Reader came as a big relief to me. It was perfect – simple, quick, easy to work with, and didn’t require you to make sense of the main Digg site which still feels like a pointless waste of time. Anyway, Digg became the perfect sequel to Google Reader.

I switched from Digg Reader to Feedbin a year ago, because Feedbin has amazing feed management tools, and is even simpler and cleaner than Digg. But every once in a while, my brain will still decide to fart and instruct my fingers to type out the URL for Digg Reader instead of Feedbin – the result of a habit of accessing Digg Reader 30 times a day for three years.

So it was sad to read about the closure of Digg Reader. You will be missed. I hope that being the subject of my first long blog post in more than five years is a sufficient tribute!