One-Minute Email & RSS

As I scan my inbox or incoming RSS feeds (with RSS feeds being scanned in a priority-based order), I quickly deal with any that I can take care of in a minute or two.  This includes reading short email messages or crafting quick (one paragraph) responses.  On the RSS side, it means skimming headlines and reading short articles that won’t take more than a minute of my time.  For anything that requires more than a minute (either reading or replying), I send it elsewhere and move on.

More-Than-Minute Email

My method for email that requires a longer read or response is to star the item in Gmail for later processing.  After an item is starred, it moves to its own section in Gmail’s priority inbox so it’s easy to find and work through these items.  I have a task in OmniFocus that reminds me to process these messages at least once a day.

Reading Longer RSS Items

For longer articles, I send the article to Instapaper (as noted in my recent “how I read” article).  The iPad is the perfect device for consuming longer text and I’ll read these articles as I have time on my device of choice.  I use Reeder on my iPhone and iPad; sending articles to Instapaper is a simple gesture.

How you process email and RSS isn’t important but you’ll need to find a system that works for you. I’ve found that my system (process the quick things, defer the longer things) works for me.

Last night I bought Reeder via the Mac App Store (app store link – $9.99). Wow. It’s really damn good.

UI

As expected, the UI is beautiful. You can choose from a couple different general views, one of which resembles a view similar to iTunes, Mail.app, etc. and the other is more like the Reeder’s look and feel on the iPad. With either view you have the ability to customize the color tones, textures, font opacity, and so on.

Keyboard Accessibility

One thing that would be critical as to whether I became a Reeder user was the level of keyboard shortcut integration. I plow through feeds at a rapid pace, my hand quickly using the keyboard to move through items, marking them as read (either automatically or manually), opening some items into a browser, and moving between my feed categories. Reeder doesn’t disappoint. It ships with single-key keyboard shortcuts for all imaginable uses including feed navigation, read/unread status, and navigation within the app. Here’s a screenshot of the default keyboard shortcuts – all of these can be changed if desired:

Integration With Other Services

Another key workflow piece (and one for which Google Reader is less than ideal) is services integration. Reeder ships with quite a few services offered:

For me, three are key. I use Instapaper to push long articles for later reading (usually on my iPad). Pinboard is my bookmarking service and how I queue links for my other people say posts. I also have the Twitter integration enabled so I can share interesting finds with my followers. Note that you can enable a custom keyboard shortcut for any of the services. This again allows me to quickly move through items without reaching for the trackball.

It’s a new Primary App

Reeder now has a global hotkey² and after just a few hours is now part of my information workflow. I’ll have to see how I feel after a few weeks but at this point I can see myself moving all of my RSS consumption to Reeder apps either on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone.

Last night at the Portland Web Innovators gathering, I had a conversation with Reid about aggregators, specifically mentioning it would be great to have a fat client app that was able to sync with Google Reader.

Today, I see that Dare Obasanjo announced Google Reader sync support in a soon-to-be-released version of RSS Bandit. I can’t wait to check this out. In the comments on his post, he notes the sync will include “mark as read” status as well as sharing – share an item via RSS Bandit, and it’ll end up in your Google Reader shared items feed. Sounds sweet.

[tags]aggregators, feeddemon, rssbandit, googlereader, rss, feeds[/tags]

Here’s my profile over there. Feel free to add me.

[tags]twitter, friendfeed[/tags]

I figured that the especially RSS-geeky among you might care to peruse my current Google Reader OMPL file. I think I removed all personal/private/incriminating feeds. Hopefully.

How about you? What’s in your reader?

[tags]opmlthursday, opml[/tags]

After reading the article, it seems to me that her problem is mostly self-imposed. She subscribes to a total of 36 feeds and seems completely stressed-out over categorization/tagging. Here’s the deal: at 36 feeds, you probably don’t need categorization/tagging. If anything maybe break out the 12 Second Life feeds into their own category, but when you’re creating categories for one or two feeds, you’re wasting time.

A big key to RSS with Google Reader is to stop organizing and start reading.

A river of news is a beautiful thing. At 36 feeds, just hit the “All Items” link in Google Reader and scroll your way through life.

[tags]rss, googlereader, riverofnews[/tags]

A Quick Note About Aggregators

When we’re talking photography, visual display matters. For a lot of text-based RSS feeds, the formatting of the aggregator isn’t a big deal since the information is all in text. As we look at retrieving photos via RSS, some aggregators are going to stand above the rest for photography.

Here’s a screenshot of how FeedDemon displays a folder of photo feeds:

This is a great view of a photo feed, allowing easy click-through to the individual items as desired. Other aggregators, such as Google Reader, will display the photo as an item in the feed without special formatting.

Getting Personal: Flickr Feeds for You

Flickr offers a couple RSS feeds which provide you with a glimpse at photos as they relate to you and your use of the social features of the site. The first is the Recent Comments feed, which lets you know who left comments on your photos. This is similar to clicking the “New Comments” link that you’ll find on Flickr’s homepage. The easiest way to get the URL for your recent comments feed is to go to your recent comments page (while logged into Flickr) and finding the Feed link near the lower left corner (look for the feed symbol ).

The second personalized feed is a feed of your contacts’ photos. As I’ve mentioned before, the power in Flickr lies in the community features, and I often visit my contacts page to see the latest work posted by the folks I follow. Those photos can also be seen via a feed. Log into Flickr, go to your friends page, then grab the Feed link near the lower left corner (again, look for the feed symbol ).

Group Feeds

Flickr also makes it easy to grab feeds for groups. You can get a feed for either the group photo pool, or the discussion topics. You might be noticing a pattern on how to find the feeds. For the discussion feed, just hit the group homepage (for example, Engineering as Art) and you’ll find the feed near the lower left. The photo pool feed can be found by going to a group’s pool page, then grabbing the feed link from the lower left… marked by the feed icon ()as usual.

Tag, You’re It!

Flickr doesn’t yet offer an easy way to grab a search feed, with the exception of tags. You can get an RSS feed of photos with a given tag by using the following feed:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=TAGNAMEHERE&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

…and replacing TAGNAMEHERE with the tag you want.

Power Play with Yahoo Pipes

What’s better than a bunch of Flickr feeds? Mixing and combining, of course! With the variety of feeds from Flickr, it’s fairly simple to use Yahoo Pipes to mix things up. In about 15 minutes I created a Flickr Portland Megafeed which mixes a half dozen Portland-related sources on Flickr, does some combining and filtering, and spits out a big feed of things related to Portland. You should be able to grab the feed, or check out the source.

Areas of Future Potential

• Feeds for comments on individual photos. Much like comment feeds on a blog post, it would be great to be able to subscribe to the comments left on individual photos. I frequently leave a comment and then want to see what else follows my comment (or see if the photographer responds to a question I’ve asked).
• A general search feed (not just tags).

RSS is a powerful way to consume information and Flickr is the most popular photo community on the ‘net. Combining the two provides a lot of value for information and photo junkies such as myself.

Having my screen filled with things I’ve already read seems like a big waste of space. Sure, the built-in Netvibes RSS module lets me configure how many items to show, and you can “mark as read” so that they’re not bold, but I still have a screen full of widgets with grayed-out headlines that are no longer relevant. This is annoying on the big screen, but when I’m mobile this is a huge usability issue… I have to sit on scroll though tons of old data to pick out the new stuff. Tonight was the first time I seriously tried to use the Netvibes mobile interface, and having to scroll though screen after screen of already-read data was a huge time-wasting pain in the ass.

Is there a better RSS module? I found a Greasemonkey script that claims it’ll do what I’m asking on the full screen version. I haven’t tried it out, but my biggest usability beef is with the mobile interface. Unless there’s a module which can hide read items from the server side, this may be the end of my Netvibes adventure…

[tags]netvibes, rss, mobile, dashboards, information[/tags]

Justin Kistner has posted recently about the usage of several tools which combine to provide a powerful market dashboard for the CMO of Jive Software. Justin also happens to be the guy behind Beer and Blog, so when this week’s topic was dashboards I decided to head down to the Lucky Lab yesterday afternoon to talk about information aggregation.

My first question was how one would have a useful information portal with 350 feeds, and the short answer is that you don’t. Using tools such as Yahoo Pipes and AideRSS, the feeds are combined, filtered, and sorted to bring the important information to the top. Justin showed some specific examples and now as I’m reading feeds in Google Reader tonight I’m looking at a lot of items that really are just wasted bits, sandwiched between the things I care about.

So… I’m going to build a dashboard. I’m going to attempt to put some thought into the process, so the first thing I’ll be doing is taking an inventory of my feeds, giving each one a rough category and priority so that I can start to visualize how many pages I’ll want, and how those pages might be arranged. Once I get things a bit organized, I’ll write another post here that talks about my plan.

I see that Justin has posted his notes from the meetup, if you want to read more about what sparked this project.

[tags]dashboards, netvibes, feeds, rss, yahoopipes, justinkistner, beerandblog[/tags]

And by my personal observations, it’s very fast. There have been several times where I’ve picked something up first via their tag feed, even when I’ve subscribed directly to the source blog. Granted that this is with either Google Reader or Newsgator, so it’s a server-side polling thing, but it still gets me the info quickly.

[tags]technorati, feeds, tagging[/tags]