Feed Reading

For the last few months I’ve been in a weird sort of RSS feed-reading state; I moved from Safari’s RSS reader (because it was really slow whenever podcasts showed up) to Newshutch, a web-based feedreader I’d read about on 37 Signals. It is beautifully done, simple, and easy to work with.

But (you knew this was coming) it’s slow. It presents feeds one at a time (like Thunderbird), which is conceptually slow, and it’s AJAX/Rails slow to deliver content, which is technically slow. I think it would really be great with a few feeds - say less than 50 - but more than 200 causes it to choke.

I found myself missing Safari, and was about to switch back over the Christmas vacation when disaster struck. Argh.

Well, with my PowerBook in limbo, I went on a quick search and revisited Google Reader. It’s fast and has the ability to read Rivers of News, instead of individual feeds.

And you can share stuff!

But…

It’s Google. That Google.

You know, the one that is about to wander the selva oscura where the straight path was lost?

The one with the goatee?

Damnit.

I miss my Mac. It was so much easier when I just had Safari to blame/tame.