jarango

Using an RSS Browser

A lot of the sites that I visit on a daily basis (/., Scripting News, etc.) are available as RSS streams. Over the past week or so, I’ve been reading these sites through an RSS browser (NetNewsWire Lite) and my browsing is getting done a lot faster. Whereas I used to spend close to an hour every day jumping from site to site, I am now fully up to speed on the news that matters to me in a couple of minutes. This seems to be mainly due to the fact that 1) all the sites are aggregated into a list that I can easily jump around in using the keyboard, and 2) I can view just the headlines without having to plod through the download times of article excerpts, etc.

This approach to browsing is a great step forward in making the Web a more efficient source of information. The irony is that I believe it’s going to be pretty slow in catching on because it looks less like browsing through magazine pages (like regular websites do) and more like a going through usenet using a mail reader. As a result, most people are going to consider this method less user-friendly than the traditional Web browser.

Next, I will try to write some AppleScript to tie NetNewsWire Lite and Kung-Log together so that I can easily post links found through the former to jarango.com using the latter. I am a complete neophyte with AppleScript, so this project will probably have to wait to xmas when I have some discretionary time to spend on it. If I can come up with something useful, I will post the resulting script here.

November 29, 2002 | Archived in Information Architecture