Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcurbo | Hacker News Reader

This exactly matches my use case for RSS. High volume daily websites - like HN - I read directly. I went through a phase where I tried to read HN via RSS (in Google Reader) and for me it wasn't better than just hitting HN directly.

But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.

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Could not agree more, this is the exact use case for the 'power users' of RSS. And he is right that without RSS I don't know how these low-posting-frequency sites would keep their readership. If I had to give up one, I'd give up twitter or hackernews long before that low-frequency RSS feed. Those posts are gold and for niche subjects (I'm into bio) there is no where else they are aggregated.

Tech, video games, etc.. journalists have a very different use case for RSS, which is exactly using it to monitor dozens of other information sources (including their competitors). I think they match the definition of power users, perhaps more than you and I, because that's the primary tool for their job : they will routinely have hundreds of RSS feeds and will skim quickly through thousands of items a day to look for the information that they haven't treated yet. RSS is perfect for that matter and it is precisely the opposite of what marco and you claim is a poor usage of RSS.

Right, RSS is great for low volume stuff that you don't want to miss.

I do have a way of using it productively with high-volume sites. Specifically, I read some of reddit via RSS. Sometimes I go deep into a project, and avoid distractions for quite a while. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on the zeitgeist. So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period - for example, the top 3 weekly stories from proggit.

Then when I'm done the project I can go back and see what important items from the group discussion I've missed. Basically just turn a constant stream into a small amount of the best content that I don't want to miss.

> So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period

Oh, I really like that idea. how do you set up that feed?

Reddit already produces the top items feeds, so that's easy. For example, the weekly top proggit feed is http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top/.rss?sort=top&t=...

You just add .rss to the url you get when browsing, before the args.

Then I used yahoo pipes to extract the top 3 items from that feed. I take the output of the yahoo pipe as input for my RSS reader, which collapses duplicates. I used google reader, so I didn't even need to open up my RSS reader for the top items to accumulate.

Here's the URL of the top 2 daily proggit posts: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ee7c0181150e421fa...

Awesome, thanks.

Exactly. Most of the blogs I read are updated once a week or even once a month, but they have great content I don't want to miss. RSS allows me to not have those sites in my bookmarks but always get their latest content.

I've also used it for Craigslist searches and store updates when items go on sale, which are infrequent enough that I would miss them unless I checked every day.

I would like to use RSS to grab frequently updated tech news, but in a separate bucket that doesn't count as "unread". I'd rather strip out the site design and just focus on the content. That's what news is, right?

I go back & forth with HN, the reason being that I often star items that I'll want to follow-up on later.

For instance, if I read something at home that I want to share with the crew at work, I'll star it. Likewise, if I come across something at work that really doesn't apply to my job, but it's still interesting, I'll star it so I won't forget to read it at home.

Granted, those functions are not part & parcel to RSS readers, but it's one way that a reader can be extended to offer value beyond the normal RSS featureset. Much like the "note in Reader" feature, which I also used multiple times a day...

I have that use case also, but I use Instapaper to do it, not just for HN but for anything I read on the Internet (inside of an RSS reader or not).

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