Hmm... I think I just came to the conclusion that I don't like RSS aggregators.
For sites that I really like and read frequently I often just visit the home page. For sites that don't update as frequently, however, I usually use my aggregator to tell me when there's something new so I don't waste time checking if there isn't. And whenever I use an aggregator, I usually just wind up double-clicking on a feed or a post so I can view the site or the post directly, rather than reading it in my aggregator, which I've found I don't like to do.
So really, I only use my aggregator as a form of update notification. But for that purpose, it's not even very efficient because updated sites are mixed in visually with sites that haven't updated. Plus, you wind up keeping a bunch of extra posts sitting around in your aggregator, which you have to be aggressive at deleting or you wind up getting buried.
I think the update notification scheme that forums use is the most efficient possible. They tell you when there's something new, but don't bother you again until you've visited the site. That way, you can only ever get one notification for each time you visit the site. In an RSS reader, by contrast, I constantly have to look at all my feeds and feel overwhelmed by all of them, either because there are feeds there with unread items, or simply because they take up more space than can fit on my screen at once[1].
For a while I've wished that there was an efficient way to have an e-mail-based RSS aggregator, where new posts would be sent to you through e-mail. The biggest barrier to that I've seen until now was that you'd need to have an elaborate folder and filter setup to filter all of the e-mail into appropriate folders. This would have to be managed automatically or it simply wouldn't be worth it.
Though, now that I've thought about it, I really don't want to be bothered for every new post on a site. I want to be told when it's been updated, and not be bothered again until I've gone to the site.
So, my new project will be to implement this idea. It'll be done through e-mail, but it'll be manageable simply because I'll only get an e-mail for each site that updates, not each new post, which means that I only need one folder for it. The main part of this is the code that figures out whether a site has updated, and that can be done as simply as RSS aggregators can do it. The way I currently envision it is a simple script on my web site that runs with a cron job, checks every site in my list that hasn't updated since I last visited, and if the site has updated, send me an e-mail. What's nice is that if a site has updated and I haven't visited it yet it won't be checked again until after I visit it, which is a bandwidth saver better than anything an RSS reader can do.
Lastly, I'd need to visit each site through a script on my site that tracks usage, something like keithdevens.com/go?[link_id]. Unfortunately, I think that's going to send a referrer to each site every time I check it, which will be annoying. I know with Firebird I can use an extension that allows me to turn off referrers temporarily, so I'll see if that makes sense for me to use.
The only other improvements on this I can think of right now are these: If I've been sent an e-mail, but haven't checked it yet, and have visited the site after the e-mail was sent, it'd be nice if the e-mail could be automatically deleted to avoid getting duplicates. Or if I used IMAP, it could be deleted even if I've already seen it. Otherwise, instead of doing this through e-mail, I may do it as something web-based.
Footnotes:
[1]: Which, by the way, is a very important design consideration. If something can't be seen all at once, the user feels overwhelmed. Think about this in terms of your e-mail. You know when you clear out your e-mail box and all of a sudden when you only have a screenful left it doesn't seem like a lot. But add one more e-mail so you have to scroll, and you might as well have 1000 unread e-mails.
Thursday, July 10, 2003
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Why use RSS for this at all? http://blo.gs/ offers a service that creates a custom XML feed with information on when the blogs you are interested in last updated (using pings to blo.gs and weblogs.com) - you could build your system by grabbing that feed once an hour and using the information in it to generate emails telling you about sites that have updated since your last visit.