23 Mobile Things #4: Keeping Up

I first encountered Zite back in those dark days when we learned that Google Reader was shutting down and that we'd need to find other ways to read our RSS feeds. As Google Reader had done pretty much everything I'd needed an RSS reader to do, I wasn't thrilled. It's one thing to go off and explore new apps in a spirit of curiosity, quite another to be forced to find an adequate substitute for something you were satisfied with. So admittedly, I wasn't in the best frame of mind when I tested Zite back then, and it wasn't the one I settled on. Instead, I chose Feedly, which went and redesigned itself to be more like Google Reader, incorporating the features I'd liked about Google Reader.

But time has passed, and if I was no longer feeling pressured to move to Zite, maybe I'd like it more. Perhaps they'd added something I'd like; apps are always being redesigned. Plus, it made sense to continue working with something I had some familiarity with rather than install still yet another app for this Thing. This time around, I've decided that even though Zite does have some good features, it's not enough to persuade me to switch.

One of Zite's strengths is its system for finding new reading material based on what you liked and didn't like of what you've already read. You vote on stories, mark topics as favorites: it was simple to figure out and intuitive to do. I want to make it clear that I think that's a great feature, just not what I personally am looking for in an RSS reader at this time. I already have a number of blogs and other sources that I follow, and I'm so far behind on reading them that I will never catch up (ack!). On top of that, friends and strangers are constantly posting interesting articles to Facebook and Twitter. I can't keep up with all that—I don't want my RSS reader finding even more stuff for me to fall behind on! (Feedly has this feature as well. It's not as easy to use, as I recall, but since I don't use it, that's not a problem.)

And then there's the magazine-style layout: "You'll get all the benefit of our powerful technology wrapped in a beautiful design that is a joy to pick up every day." I'm sure many people love it, but I find it a chaotic mess, and it mostly leaves me wanting to shut the app down rather than read anything. Feedly also has a magazine layout—that's probably the default—but it wasn't difficult to switch it to a list of article titles, grouped by the categories I chose. If there's a way to do that in Zite, easy or hard, I have yet to find it. I like Feedly's mass deletion feature, where I can swipe and mark an entire page as read. Or I can just swipe over individual stories, leaving others for later. And Feedly syncs with a website I can access from my desktop computer, for those times when I have a few minutes to read at my desk. Not Zite.

Which sums up my feelings overall: not Zite. Blog post written, I'm off to delete it from my iPad. Again.

Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I see there is a slight misunderstanding here. Having read through Thing 30, it sounds like the More 23 Things program believes that I am actively pursuing more RSS feeds to follow, more websites to be kept abreast of, etc., and is helpfully offering me tools to manage the flood of updates. At present, I have a talent for finding RSS feeds that rarely update at all, so I'm only having to handle 10-20 updates/day. It just seems like overkill to filter them. I don't particularly want anything emailing my RSS feeds to me--if I'm online, I can just check Google Reader or Bloglines--and if they're sent to my cell phone, I'm going to end up paying for them.

Since I wasn't finding the "normal" use of RSS enhancers all that tantalizing, I decided to poke around some of the more creative applications. Simpletracking.com sounds promising. I get a bit obsessive about wondering where my packages are, and I have a tendency to leave the confirmation emails with the tracking numbers in accounts I can't access except at home. I was disappointed to see that UPS doesn't want to play with them, since most of my packages are sent via UPS, but I will try them out the next time someone sends me something via FedEx. Or the post office, for that matter. The post office's tracking system is horrid; I suppose Simpletracking.com isn't going to be able to do anything about that.

ReminderFeed looks really useful. It seemed a bit...um...simple. Like, all I had to do was come up with something to be reminded about, plus a password? That's it? I can handle that.

I did try adding RSS feeds to my homepage and this blog. I took them off again, though. I'm satisfied with leaving a button for Google Reader in my bookmarks and Delicious toolbars and checking it when I'm in the mood. I've also got a Bloglines account, but it doesn't seem to do things much differently than Google Reader, so it mostly feels like duplication. I had been hoping that Bloglines could handle feed authentication--Google Reader adamantly refuses to do so (perhaps because their blogs can't be made private, so you don't need feed authentication to read them?)--but it seems to choke on it as well. Rumor has it that FeedDemon manages it, but I'm running out of energy to just keep signing up for new accounts everywhere.

Okay, okay, I admit I underutilize Delicious. But it just feels horribly sloppy to bookmark tons of things I'll never visit again. It wasn't until Thing 30, though, that I realized that here you're supposed to be making connections (the network) with people you don't know and aren't communicating with. I thought this was like Facebook, where there was supposed to be more of a personal connection, and since I hardly know anyone who uses Delicious--that's more like, many people I know use it, but I don't know their usernames there--I felt sort of alone. No, no--I shall now go forth and connect with all sorts of strangers. How unnatural for me.

I do like the idea of Tagrolls and Linkrolls. I'm going to finish up this post and then see if I can get one on 23 Distractions without screwing up the layout too badly.

Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

I knew about the Electronic Library for Minnesota before I started the 23 Things. It's been very useful now that I'm back in student mode--I love being able to get journal articles without having to take the time to go over to a library and I really don't miss trying to make photocopies from bound journals. However, I didn't know that the databases came with extras before playing with Thing 17.

I think EBSCO's Personal Folder feature will be really useful. It was a lot easier to save the articles for my current class to this folder instead of downloading them to a flash drive. After all, I never remember which flash drive I used and when you save an article to a computer, the file name is a meaningless string of letters and numbers--saved to the Folder, the file name is the article title. Although my high hopes for getting all my articles neatly organized and available from any computer crashed when I realized that one of the assigned articles was from another company's database. Oh well.

The Search Alert feature was less successful. Having dinked around with it for a few days, it looks like I can set up a successful RSS feed through IE7 or Outlook, which is fine when I'm at work. But I use Firefox 3 and Thunderbird at home, and I just couldn't get the RSS feed set up on either of them successfully. Oh, it looked like it was set up in Thunderbird (Firefox couldn't "see" the RSS feed at all), but whenever a new article came in and I clicked on its link, I was sent to a login page that wanted a username and password that I didn't have. If I tried, perhaps I could get this working on Google Reader, but like I said back at Thing 3, I don't want to use Google Reader. And it wasn't clear where I should go for help. My library? EBSCO?

I've had mixed feelings about NetLibrary for years. It's a great idea, but the books included seem to mostly be a random mixture of this and that. And once I've chosen a book, the layout strikes me as odd. Maybe I'm just wired for print books more than electronic ones! But I love the idea of being able to run keyword searches on books, not just journal and magazine articles, so I hope NetLibrary (and other variants of electronic books) continue to improve.

Thing 3: RSS

Finally: something 2.0-ish that I was already familiar with. My first foray into the world of RSS was with Sage, a Firefox add-on. I suppose it worked decently enough--I used it for months and I still haven't uninstalled it--but I never really was all that fond of it either. Sage mostly just gives you the text of whatever it is you've linked to, and after a while I missed the bells and whistles of people's sites. And it wasn't much use at all for keeping up with a webcomic!

A number of months ago, I created a Google Reader account. The problem here was that even though I have a link to Google Reader in Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar, which is about as much in my face as you can get, I never get around to actually clicking on the link.

Lately, I've been doing RSS through my various email programs. Both Outlook and Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds. This is proving to be the most satisfactory solution yet. Every time I go online I check my email, and both programs just check RSS feeds automatically while looking for new mail. And once I see that there's something new to read, I'm usually curious enough to go and read it.

I mostly just happen upon RSS feeds that I want to pursue. Funny: in the end, there just aren't that many sites I need to be constantly on top of.