Email vs. Feeds
A little plug here for my friend Jeff. He's been working on an email utility called mailpie, a set of command-line programs providing full-text indexing and searching of large email archives. I'm not using it yet, because I've been too lazy to set it up, but it looks pretty cool.
Lately, Jeff and I were discussing the limitations of our approaches to reading our feeds. During a fit of outsourcing, I settled on Google Reader. Jeff continues to prefer to make it tough for advertisers to mine his data, opting for Planet. Like any software, both have minor issues.
I like Google Reader's keyboardable interface. That makes old
Unix-heads like me happy. I don't like that old, unread entries don't
quietly slip away. There's a lot of pressure from the line on the
navigation pane that says, Liberal Rubbish (1000+)
. It makes me
feel bad for not keeping up, and makes reading my feeds seem like work.
Probably this could be solved with a Mark as read after some period
of time
setting, but that currently doesn't exist. I'd like
them to expire based on the time-to-live specified by the feed itself.
Feeds are by their nature ephemeral, and keeping them around and all up
in my fries misses the point. When I look at my feeds, I want to see
what's new, not the history of the website back to the beginning of
time.
I also feel a little dirty using Google Reader because I know that all my clicks, choice of subscriptions, and entry keywords are being inspected and dissected by Google's army of virtual demographers and adaptive hindbrain delivery scripts, so my brain can be picked apart and sold to advertisers. Nevermind that my browser provides anti-marketing countermeasures; knowing this is going on is irksome.
Yes, blah blah business model. Yes, blah don't be evil blah. Yes, I know my data is not linked back to me individually. I know, I know. I love the power the Google gives me, and I take advantage of it. It just squicks me out sometimes.
Bonus points for the Google's brilliant, intutive, usable AJAX interface, though.
My primary reason for not choosing Planet is essentially a bug: the feeds are cached, and the caches are never cleaned-up, growing to fill the disk space they have available. Lacking the desire to worry about solving this problem, along with going through an offloading phase, during which I started using flickr seriously, along with Google Calendar and Reader, steered me away from Planet.
...So Jeff and I were talking about feeds and readers the other day.
Because we both choose mutt as our
email clients, with appreciation for its power and flexibility, Jeff
said, I should write something like mailpie for feeds. It would put
together mbox mailboxes, readable from mutt.
As I've been
working on the next generation of my feed sidebar-plugins for pyblosxom, I've been
thinking about that idea. Here are a few of the things that have crossed
my mind.
Pros:
- Mutt has a well-known and convenient user interface.
- Like email messages, feed items are discrete chunks.
- There are no distracting bells and whistles in mutt. Just cool, comfortable text.
Cons:
- Feed items often have embedded links the reader would like to follow. Mutt does not support links directly (or any rendering of embedded html, for that matter). The user would have to contrive to run a text-based browser to display each feed entry, or strip the formatting entirely and devise a way to display links so the user could take advantage of any terminal-based utilities for following a link.
- Feed items, while not dependent on formatting, may be multimedia. YouTube videos do not fit well in mutt. You'd have to fire up a browser to see them. (Or embedded pictures or podcasts or...)
- Unlike email messages, feed items are typically not threaded. One of the major benefits of mutt is irrelevant.
- Barring some kind of intelligent downloading scheme, feeds that
are not full text are inconvenient to read if you're pretending
they're something like email messages. Of course, they're
inconvenient to read, whatever reader is used.
It’s not exactly a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler is considering dipping into ... (5 comments)
Thanks, journalstar.com. - Mailpie's strength lay in its full text search of an archive of email messages. I don't want an archive of feed items. The web is essentially that, using Google as the index.
The jury's still out. The idea of a text-mode, minimally formatted feed reader is attractive. (Any of you whippersnappers remember Gopher?). The question is how to present the potentially rich set of data with links usefully. Maybe its just a matter of providing a properly configured mutt...
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Too Much Intarblags
For a while I used Sage to read my feeds. It served well enough, but I use several different machines, and none of them would be in sync. I thought about self-hosting, with Planet or similar. To be honest, I'm still thinking about it, in part because of my usual reservations about turning over my stuff to third parties.
It occurs to me that I may just be too paranoid to be 2.0.
Despite that, I decided to give Google Reader a go first. It works well, seamlessly in my browser like you'd expect from a Google product. Unfortunately, it also keeps my apprised of how many things are waiting to be looked at.
This morning, when I checked my feeds when getting up, there were 689 outstanding items. Tonight, as I wrap up my day, there are 813. I doubt I can keep up, but I can't decide what to cut.
I lose at teh internets.
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