My Dream RSS Reader
I dropped two generalist feeds from my Google RSS Reader, both well ranked and known. I’m convinced feeds need to be specific. These feeds publish a couple of good posts per quarter but the rest of the content (such as US election candidates) I couldn’t care less about. I want specific information else in some cases everything from an identity or a friend.
Some people might only be interested in my trading views as an example. I had a spike in traffic which seemed to be internal Microsoft people checking out my Facetime for Microsoft Bought Cheap post. However I doubt they would be interested in my personal content. To support specific RSS content better we really need a couple of elements. Mainstream bloggers adopting multiple feed approach instead of one bulk feed. Otherwise better filtering mechanisms in RSS readers. There’s other ways but these seem the most probable and some are already in play.
The old economy data management shops like Reuters and Bloomberg have a lot to teach the Y-Gen reader developers.
My dream RSS reader would:
- give me tight 1 line snippets of blog posts in a list.
- allow me to exclude posts using tag filters.
- allow me to adjust font size so I can jam more posts in a page.
- add posts in from the top, waterfall style.
- highlight new post arrivals.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Heya - If I understand you correctly, you can actually do what you’re suggesting straight out of the box with Wordpress, although it’s not immediately obvious.
Every category has it’s own feed - so if you’re interested in the “Carbon economy” category on my blog, you just append “/feed” to the end of the URL - so you end up with:
http://synapsechronicles.com/category/carboneconomy/feed
That’s an RSS feed of just that category. Unfortunately, most Wordpress themes don’t expose this via the UI.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:10 am
ah yes that’s great thanks! right under my nose and i didn’t even notice it