Yesterday I wondered aloud why RSS readers look like email clients.
@brentsimmons replied. Turns out he borrowed that layout for NetNewsWire in 2002 — and twenty years later, he's asking why no one's tried something different.
That conversation became an essay. I built a visual version (with an ASCII fallback).
@tg Great essay! Following to see what you might come up with.
I tried Tapestry and the new Reeder but they didn’t work for me. It felt like they made everything too transient, and I worried about missing something I really wanted to read. I think my ideal solution would have a way to distinguish between feeds where every post is meaningful (personal blogs) and feeds that I just want to sample periodically (news).
@tg I’m using ReadKit now and I like it’s time-based smart folders. I have ones for “Today”, “This Week”, and “Vintage” (older than two weeks, but probably should be even older than that). It’s a coarse tool, but it helps me skim newer stuff and cull older posts more effectively.
Being able to set expiry rules on a feed-by-feed basis might help with treating some feeds as transient and others as more precious.
Terry Godier
jmccance