Reading Feeds With RSS Bandit

Dave Naylor and I were IMing
today about IE 7’s new RSS feature. He was very excited. I haven’t tried it yet,
but the screenshot he sent me didn’t make me think it was better than the
RSS Bandit feed reader I currently use.
I’ve been meaning to write about that anyway, so this gave me an excuse.

Let me preface this by saying that everyone seems a bit different on how they
read feeds. Some do it for pleasure, and they aren’t worried about missing
something, in the same way they might not worry if they missed a day or two of
reading the newspaper. Others read for work and maybe manage a ton of feeds
(that’s me). Others seem to want to read one feed at a time, something I’ve seen
some people describe as "wrong" or "stupid."

My feeling is that there is no "right" way to read feeds. Anyone who tells
you that is the stupid one. What’s the "right" way to read a newspaper or watch
TV. Can you start with Business and then read the main news sections. Do you
need to watch each program from beginning to end or is flipping allowed?

Read feeds however you want. What is helpful is to hear about how others do,
because you can pick up tips or ideas on how you might improve your own reading.

I’m going to explain how I’ve shifted in my own reading. I hope some find
that useful, but like I said, I’m not saying this is the "right" way to read nor
that I use the "right" tool that everyone should use. It just what works for me.

My first feed reader was Newsgator, which put feeds into Outlook (why I
abandoned Newsgator it is covered
here). I had a folder for each individual feed, and I’d go to that folder to
read each new item. It was sort of like getting your email from one person
filtered into its own folder.

You can do the same in RSS Bandit. For example, look at this picture:

You can see that I’ve highlighted my Daggle feed over in the left-hand
column. At the top of the right hand column, I can see all the headlines of new
stuff I haven’t read from the feed. Down below, I have the individual feed
items.

If I select a particular item, I’ll see the summary (or the entire text of
the item, if it’s a full-text feed), as shown below:

If I click on the item’s link, I can have the actual item load into my
browser (or within RSS Bandit, if I prefer).

This is how I used to read feeds, one feed at a time, going through each item
and deleting them out one by one. Over time, my feeds grew to more than 100, so
doing a feed-by-feed, item-by-item read like this was a pain.

Eventually, I discovered that Newsgator allowed me to put several feeds into
one folder. By doing this, I could quickly scan all the items from a group of
feeds and see what was new. RSS Bandit allows you to do the same. Look at this:

Over on the left-hand side, you can see that I have various folders, such as:

• 1) Search Hot
• 2) Search Medium
• 3) Search Cool

Each folder contains several feeds. I’ve opened up the Search Hot folder.
Within it, you can see things like Google
Blogoscoped, John Battelle’s Searchblog,
Matt Cutts,
Threadwatch and so on.

Now those in my "Hot" folder shouldn’t get super excited that I consider them
somehow better than other blogs, and those in my "Medium" or "Cool" folders
shouldn’t feel insulted. These categories primarily evolved out of how active
the various blogs were. Threadwatch is a jumping place. If something’s happening
on the web about search, that’s a good place to look. So’s the
Search Engine Watch Blog,
by the way! I just have it in Search Cool because I already know what’s on the
blog. Meanwhile, someone like Dave
Naylor or Greg Boser may have an
exceptionally great post. But because they don’t post often, I didn’t need to
check on their feeds as regularly as with others — at least the way I used to
read.

During my day, I’d be watching my Search Hot folder constantly, several times
per hour. My Medium, Cool and other folders, I might check them once or twice
per day. Of course, the nice thing with RSS Bandit was that if any folder had
something new, I could immediately tell because that folder would go bold and
show me the number of new items after it.

I felt my feed reading was pretty perfect at this point. I could hit
different categories of feeds, see what was going on and not feel overwhelmed. I
also thought it was better than the "River Of News" style of reading that Dave
Winer talks about
in that it was more focused rivers. I didn’t want my Mississippi River of search
news getting muddied up by my Missouri River of non-search feeds, for example.

Eventually, I stumbled upon RSS Bandit’s Unread Items folder, and so far I
never want to leave it. Here it is in action:

The folder shows me all the unread items from all my feeds at once. No more
going into each feed group to see what’s new. Unread Items is where I live
throughout the day. I start my morning by seeing what’s new in the folder. I
arrow my way down the list, reading the summaries in my top pane and deleting
out each item as I read (if you prefer, you can read in the bottom pane — and
you can adjust the pane sizes, too). Anything important, I copy the URL into a
working file in my web editor, FrontPage (don’t nag me about FrontPage — it
works fine for me and has for years).

These days, when I add new feeds, I wonder if it makes sense to put them into
various categories any more. I never use those categories now. But
organizationally, I think it’s helpful in the long run. Plus, at the moment I
don’t have a ton of "personal" or "fun" feeds that I read just for enjoyment. If
that changes, I might need to separate them out in some way. Unread Items shows
you EVERYTHING from all categories. Eventually, maybe I’d have a folder called
Work and one called Fun. Going into either of these folders would do the same as
Unread Items, since anything new for that particular folder would be at the top.

I should also mention that while I operate on a "save item elsewhere and
delete from RSS Bandit" model, there are better tools built in that I haven’t
played with much. Any item can be "flagged" within RSS Bandit, for example You
can flag something for review, for follow up and so on, then go into your Review
or Follow Up folder to see these. You can also post to
del.icio.us, to Blogger and some other places.

I don’t really want to do this, however. I’d like to be able to copy items
into various folders according to subjects such as "China Censorship," so that
if I’m going to work on a story long-term on that subject, I can collect all my
items I’ve found easily.

I know, I want to tag the items! And yes, I could do that via del.icio.us.
But that’s really overkill for me. I’d rather just drag-and-drop an item within
RSS Bandit, which you can’t do right now.

I also need to point out that the minimalist display I use in RSS Bandit is
on purpose. I just really want to copy link and text to FrontPage, so I keep the
look and feel sparse. If I were doing some serious reading in RSS Bandit, there
are many templates I could choose from, including making everything appear as if
it were on Slashdot, like this:

I’ll have to work up a Search Engine Watch template!

One thing River Of News fans will be disappointed in is that there’s no
option to see all your feeds at once like this. For instance, look back up at
when I showed what was in my Search Hot folder. Any past read items I hadn’t
deleted along with new items were shown. But if I go to the top level My Feeds
master folder, I see nothing.

It’s not so much an issue for me, because I use the Unread Items this way,
going down through each item one by one and reading in the screen above. Purists
I suppose would wish for a single scrolling view with each item in the top
screen. That could be better — maybe it will change over time.

I’ll explore a bit more about RSS Bandit in the future, in particular to
explain how it is so much more portable from computer to computer than
Newsgator, an issue I covered
previously.