My name is Benjamin. I come from the UK (although I was born in New Zealand) and I have been described as having a ginger personality. Whatever that means. I assume they're referring to my hair and my Ronald Weasley nature. Aside from that, I'm the only male blogger worth knowing.

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03/08/2007
Geek

Are RSS readers that great?

For the past few months, I embarked on a route which I was unfamiliar with. I decided to add all my daily websites to an RSS Reader (through my iGoogle homepage) and see whether these programmes were really as great as people said.

I must admit that this sudden urge to check RSS readers out was provoked by a thread over at Snark, where members were asked how many RSS feeds they were subscribed to. The answers were pretty ranged, from 0 to 271. 271 feeds… 271 different websites… I just couldn’t see the point.

My first problem that I came across when adding my daily websites to the RSS Reader, was the fact alot of my dailies did not offer an RSS Feed. Which threw the whole idea out of the window; that I would not have to visit my dailies websites everyday (obviously, if they are named ‘dailies) to find whether they had bothered to blog or not.

However, it was very nice to be able to open up my iGoogle homepage, and see instantly who had blogged. I could monitor the activity of all my favourite websites from one location. Not only monitor, but read the posts aswell (assuming they had added the option to, instead of only displaying an excerpt from a post). Another positive I found, was I was able to add photograph websites to my RSS feed, so I knew whenever they had new photographs. I was also able to add colour schemes to my RSS Reader, so I was able to get the highest rated and most popular colour schemes from Kuler - Always helpful when designing.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, I realised that my major problem was that I didn’t get to browse my dailies websites… I didn’t get to see their designs. I must admit, when I started out, I was looking for ease of not having to visit their websites everyday (lazy, I know), but going through a RSS Reader just does not have the same satisfaction. Viewing the post as a whole, within its environment (the website itself) is actually part of the whole point of blogging - seeing all the comments left by other readers, possibly opening a debate.

So, are RSS Readers really that great? I personally don’t think so. I love how I can get recent photographs of professional photographers, or the best rated colour schemes, but I missed the viewing of websites and seeing their great designs. Therefore, I think I will stick to good, old browsing through links and typing the address in my browser.

What do you think?

Ben

Amelie
03/08/2007

I use Firefox’s live bookmarks as my feedreader, that way I get to see who’s updated but when I click on the feed title I go directly to their site to see the update and I don’t miss out on their designs.

I think Safari has a similar feature… Add a bookmark as feed://urlhere.blah/feed/ and it should make itself a live bookmark. That way you can just look down the list of entries in the new bookmark folder and see those that interest you directly on the site :)

Rilla
03/08/2007

Wow really? You subscribe and then you just read posts from there? I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Plain text doesn’t have as much individuality and personality as text on the author’s design would have so… I monitor my RSS updates and when I see they update I click on the feed to access the actual site post.

Most of my blog “dailies” have RSS even if they don’t have the RSS link on the site. Usually it’s just domain.com/rss/. But I guess most people who code their own CMS don’t consider using RSS feeds for their posts.

Lils
03/08/2007

I’ve recently embarked on the route of RSS feeds too, using Google Reader. I find them very userful, and google reader is now my homepage. All my favourite blogs have a RSS feed and I find it very useful overall, I keep the number of feeds I read fairly small though. :)

Tracy
03/08/2007

Hm, I love the RSS :) The blogs on my igoogle - I only see the topic of the new blog (like yours today) and I have to click it (which makes me come to your site - to your blog post directly) and I read it on the owners website. I’m really happy with my feeds actually :D

Jenny
04/08/2007

Erm.

I think they’re good for what they’re supposed to do. :-/

Skye
04/08/2007

I think they are helpful in cutting down your time in the internet, which is good. It’s more like an alarm for me. I let the feed deliver some sort of ’sign’ that the blog I subscribed to has been updated. I then proceed to the blog and read the post there. Nothing beats visiting sites. However. it’s just too time consuming to visit every blog you like just to check for updates… that’s where feeds do the dirty work.

Linda Belle
05/08/2007

I think those are all valid reasons to question if an RSS Reader is really necessary. I usually use it just to keep me updated on sites so I don’t have to spend hours and hours getting sidetracked. They’re useful to update me on a new post, but I usually go directly to the blog to comment. :)

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