R.I.P. NetNewsWire?
I stopped using NetNewsWire a few months back and felt pretty guilty since I’d foamed significantly at the mouth regarding RSS readers a few months back.
It fell out favor during the great Jaguar/Panther migration… it was “yet another thing” I needed to ressuciate after my many and frequent upgrades and I just stopped doing it. At the time, I wondered, “Well, let’s see how much I depend on NNW… let’s see if I miss it.”
Two weeks later, I still hadn’t brought NNW to my work desktop. I’m made some adjustments within Safari… a couple sets of grouped tabs… promiscuous use of the Apple-Clicks on URLS… all the same sort of pre-NNW information management tricks I’d cooked up to sift those bits.
Today I got fed up.
After french pressing myself a cup of Peet’s Holiday Blend, I was settling into my morning routine of information consumption. I was clicking hither and yon and I realized… there’s a better way to do this.
Welcome back NNW. Sorry Brent… brain cramp. My bad.
[Update]: I completely nuked all the existing subscriptions in NNW and have started fresh. Incidentally, I do the same thing with my address book whenever I switch jobs — it’s a Darwinian selection of the relevant process.
Anyhow, as I started add new subscriptions, I quickly needed to start grouping subscriptions. Current groups are FAVES, EYEBALLIN’, BIZ, APPLE, and NEWS. I was wondering, if you do use a newsreader, what are your current group names?
Blogs, Media (Boing Boing, Gawker, Kicker, Romanesko), Mac Blogs (Daring Fireball type stuff), Mac News (MacCentral and the like), Blawgs (SCO, trademarks, etc), MT (blog-related blogs), Design (Typographi.ca, Design Observer), Domesticity (House in Progress, Appetites.us). New subscriptions sit at the end of the list until I decide whether to permanently put them in a folder or delete them. It took me a while to work out my groups but I'm at the point now where everything feels like it's in the right place. My bigger issue is that sometime in the last few weeks, I've crossed a line from "NNW, filling my brain with information!" to "NNW, I can't keep up with all those friggin' headlines!"... I was comfortable with 300 subscriptions; 350 seems to have been the breaking point.
Ahh, to have a Mac with NNW.
I'm using AmphetaDesk for my RSS needs, right now, and it doesn't actually HAVE grouping. Which, combined with the lack of ability to rewrite the XML on the fly to crop out stories I've already read, means that it's time to modify it.
Someone should buy me a Mac. :)
I only have Livejournal and Comics directories under NNW but I seriously need to think of some kind of structure since my list is growing massive and NNW doesn't scroll the left list to the selected feed when I spacebar through them. I loose all sense of where I am in my subscriptions when I can't see a highlighted selection on the left nestled between his brethren.
Oh and if you like comics and RSS:
He's gotta fix that CSS though
I'm using Shrook and have:
Friends - various people I know and a few I don't but can't fit elsewhere
Tech - Register, Ars, Gizmodo, Googleblog, etc
Mac - MacCentral, MacMinute, IMG, MacOS X Hints, Perversion Tracker, and so on
Culture - Metafilter, Plastic, Memepool, Boing Boing
News - Guardian Unlimited, BBC News, Yahoo News
Opinion - Atrios, TPM, Calpundit
Freeverse - people who blog at my office or friends thereof
NYC - Gawker, MTA service advisories
Thrilling, I know.
Shrook appears to be gathering steam -- it's been slowly creeping up in the usage logs... ~ 3% for Shrook whereas NNW is ~ 8%.
88 Subscriptions - I really need to pare that down a bit as I only read about 2/3 of them now.
Groups are: alexking.org (gotta make sure my stuff is working), Blogs, Sports Blogs, Forums, Mac News, Tech, News, Politics, Sandbox, Feedster (feeds of search results), Products.
What can I say, I've become an RSS junkie. :)
I use and deeply, deeply love NNW myself. My feed categories, in top-to-bottom order:
- News: mostly feeds from dead tree newspapers and media outlets like CNN)
- Comics: a handful from Tapestry, linked in a comment above
- Mac: news, software update sites, rumors, pundits
- Security: scraped mailing list feeds, infosec news sites
- Tech: general tech news, CNet, Wired, etc
- Music: music review sites, a pretty small category at this point
- Weblogs: a relatively small selection of mostly personal blogs with the requisite BoingBoing, Fleshbot, Metafilter and the like for some group action
Despite the order, I tend to read the weblogs the most and the real news the least. Go figure.
I've been using NNW for a long time now, and have settled into the belief that the fewer groups the better:
Friends, Daily, Weekly, Misc.
- Intelligent People (incl. Rands, of course)
- Applications (updates about specific products)
- Macintosh
- Tech News
- Typography
- Web Development
- Austeniana (blogs by Jane Austen freaks)
- Books
- Cartoons
- Culture (e.g., BoingBoing, Salon)
- Domestic Science (crafts, food)
- Friends
- Normal News (mostly UK newspapers, and a bunch of Command Post feeds)
- NYC (just added, thanks to Lloyd--don't know why I didn't think of it sooner)
- Politblogs
- New Blog Quarantine (incl. long-skimmed blogs to which I'm perpetually on the verge of unsubscribing--aka Stupid People)
- My Feeds
NNW, with seven groups...
- new finds
- personal
- macintosh
- tech
- news
- links
- politics
- comics
After a year or two of frustration I finally threw the whole RSS newsreader concept out the window. Firebird lets me open an entire subsection of my bookmarks in tabs all at once, so I just throw all the blogs I read into one and load them all at once.
no groups. can't be bothered. there are only 24 entries in my OPML anyway. I had a massive bloodletting in the OPML file a month or so ago, because it was taking me AFD just to read the news.
First stage was to kill all the sites that put the same string in and . WTF is the point of having an RSS feed at all if you're going to do that? Sites like that are a shitload faster to read directly with a browser. Faster yet just to ignore them entirely, the worthwhile stuff will be carried by someone who actually publishes useful RSS.
Second stage was to eliminate all the industry pundit sites that serve as marketing tools for consultants; most of those are updated once every three months, max. Goodbye Alan Reiter, goodbye Loftesness.
Third stage was to eliminate just about everything that involved editorializing. Goodbye Whiner, goodbye Kos, goodbye Pirillo, goodbye jwz (actually I think jwz went in the first stage). I'm 44 years old, for God's sake, and I live in Tennessee. If I want to know what you think, I'll damn well email you and ask.
There's still quite a bit of redundancy among my 24 sources; further trimming is in order. Boing Boing is probably next to go. I added Gizmodo the other day, and most of what I liked about BB was the links to Gizmodo. NPR is turning into Radio Boing Boing anyway.
Whoops, two dead feeds. Down to 22. And WTF is Linux Journal doing there?
whoops. that's "sites that put the same string in TITLE and DESCRIPTION".
'Oh bother' said Pooh as his AmphetaDesk loads.
AmphetaDesk:
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/
AmphetaOutlines:
http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/AmphetaOutlines
What's NetNewsWire?
Hey rands, out of curiosity, at your day job, you know where you're a project manager (or whatever), ... do you actually do *work*? :-)
I'm using bloglines, and I've got the stuff at the top not in a folder, comics, midlist, dross, high and pro. The stuff not in a folder I want to read, the midlist I probably want to read, the dross is on it's way out. High is just the high volume stuff for when I want a feel for what's whizzing around and pro is for stuff like the NYT, BBC, Salon etc.
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