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I mentioned this to Marco and it's why I built NewsBlur, http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com, specifically for folks like me who follow a few dozen

by conesus 15y ago

I mentioned this to Marco and it's why I built NewsBlur, http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com, specifically for folks like me who follow a few dozen (even a hundred or more) blogs written by a single author. You want to engage with that author on their terms, which means their site. Not stripped away in an RSS feed reader with no context. I built an Original view to solve this very issue. It's solving the crux of the RSS problem for people like this. You want to follow dozens of writers but you also want to go to their site. But since they may be infrequent, RSS is the only decent answer. NewsBlur's Original view couples the benefit of RSS with the writer's artistic intention in site design and flow. I also added a trainable intelligence filter to hide stories from those constant-stream multiple-author blogs. I use the intelligence filters to read the Hacker News firehose and only see stories with [`python`, `javascript`, `ask hn`, `poll`] in their titles.

zalew 15y ago
typo in link. http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.newsblur.com/ FTFY
voidfiles 15y ago
Doesn't the fitter remove serendipity from the feed reading process. Machine learning algos can't ever replace human editing. The messiness of feeds if managed correctly will often surprise you with things you wouldn't have otherwise read.
- conesus 15y ago
  I actually only use machine learning to present options for you to filter or highlight. Everything is explicit, which means you know exactly what you're missing and what's getting highlighted. (I refer to filter and highlight, but NewsBlur uses a traffic light of unread stories -- red is filtered, yellow is neither, and green is highlighted. You just flip between those three unread states with a slider control.)
mhd 15y ago
> You want to engage with that author on their terms, which means their site. Actually, that's one of the prime reason why I'm an ardent RSS reader user: It's a pretty neat way to just get the content of an article. And as we're talking about news and blog posts here, that's what it all should be about, not your great typekit-served webfont, not your twitter and facebook sidebars, not your blogroll. My current approach basically has three tiers: First, I scroll through everything in Google Reader. Using keyboard shortcuts I skip the uninteresting parts, read the short blogs, and if there's a longer article that's interesting (or a crippled feed's abstract looks that way), I'll press "v" and get the article in a new tab (using a Firefox preference or a Chrome extension, this tab opens in the background). After I'm "Inbox Zero" with my feed, I'll read those tabs. Quite often I have to use the print view or Readability on it to actually get to the basic content for those. And if those are too long or, while basically interesting, not very enticing or needed at the moment, I'll send them to Instapaper and read it at leisure later. I think there's a Mac app that has something similar to your Original view, but personally, that would be a big step backwards regarding usability for me. Never mind that quite often it's not really the writer's "artistic intention" you're ignoring, but that of the news site's designers or the WordPress theme author (quite often not chosen for the readability of the body text). There aren't that many Jason Santa Marias out there who create unique styles for every blog post (and where style and substance actually exist in harmony).

by conesus 15y ago

zalew 15y ago

typo in link. http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.newsblur.com/ FTFY

voidfiles 15y ago

Doesn't the fitter remove serendipity from the feed reading process. Machine learning algos can't ever replace human editing. The messiness of feeds if managed correctly will often surprise you with things you wouldn't have otherwise read.

conesus 15y ago
I actually only use machine learning to present options for you to filter or highlight. Everything is explicit, which means you know exactly what you're missing and what's getting highlighted. (I refer to filter and highlight, but NewsBlur uses a traffic light of unread stories -- red is filtered, yellow is neither, and green is highlighted. You just flip between those three unread states with a slider control.)

mhd 15y ago

> You want to engage with that author on their terms, which means their site. Actually, that's one of the prime reason why I'm an ardent RSS reader user: It's a pretty neat way to just get the content of an article. And as we're talking about news and blog posts here, that's what it all should be about, not your great typekit-served webfont, not your twitter and facebook sidebars, not your blogroll. My current approach basically has three tiers: First, I scroll through everything in Google Reader. Using keyboard shortcuts I skip the uninteresting parts, read the short blogs, and if there's a longer article that's interesting (or a crippled feed's abstract looks that way), I'll press "v" and get the article in a new tab (using a Firefox preference or a Chrome extension, this tab opens in the background). After I'm "Inbox Zero" with my feed, I'll read those tabs. Quite often I have to use the print view or Readability on it to actually get to the basic content for those. And if those are too long or, while basically interesting, not very enticing or needed at the moment, I'll send them to Instapaper and read it at leisure later. I think there's a Mac app that has something similar to your Original view, but personally, that would be a big step backwards regarding usability for me. Never mind that quite often it's not really the writer's "artistic intention" you're ignoring, but that of the news site's designers or the WordPress theme author (quite often not chosen for the readability of the body text). There aren't that many Jason Santa Marias out there who create unique styles for every blog post (and where style and substance actually exist in harmony).