Organizational Smackdown: RSS
Welcome to the first in a series of Organizational Smackdowns.
As you know, the sole content of this blog for a week or so (when there is content) has been devoted to organizational tools. I've felt that I have too many things in too many places, and/or some of the stuff I'm using is inconvenient.
Yesterday I charted out all of the stuff I wanted to organize (online stuff - not actual, real stuff) and am starting to try new things out. First up? RSS.
Ever since I got turned on to RSS I've been using a standalone newsreader. I dabbled with Google Reader for a while but never got into it until I started finding it a simple way to keep up to date with stuff on a PC. Now I use it at work to check in on things but, of course, it's out of sync with my standalone newsreader.
I had a few options. First was to continue to use a standalone newsreader and Google Reader, as I do today. But that's not fun. Second? Standalone with some sort of sync. This basically means NetNewsWire. And third, go solely with Google Reader.
I chose option three. And I will admit, it's a little weird not having a dock icon with "283" or some ridiculous number of unread RSS articles in it. But QuickSilver brings up GReader quickly enough and then, it's reading bliss.
The giant, giant caveat with this method is that there's no way to read things offline - or rather, no convenient way for me. See, I use OmniWeb. And Google Reader does support Google Gears for offline reading but... only on Firefox. And I don't think I want to keep Firefox, a known memory hog, around just for the purpose of RSSing (but I was tempted to do so!) Still, this is a true limitation and one with no good workaround that I'm aware of just yet.
Other than that, so far so good. I don't feel like I'm missing too too much by not keeping Vienna, my newsreader, around.
Update #1: It's been a few days since I switched to GReader exclusively. I find it a little weird to not have that dock icon handy and ready to go. I also think subscribing to RSS feeds is a chore with it; I can't just click the newspaper icon in OmniWeb. Instead I have to copy & paste the URL into GReader. Blah.
I was writing a blog post a few days ago elsewhere and wanted to base it on a post I'd read in GReader. In Vienna, I'd just keep the window open and switch between it and the editor. So I opened up GReader, clicked the folder the post should've been in and... it's not there! Only the newest ones, even with "all items" selected. I freaked. "I just read that! WTF! Vienna! HELP!" I searched the settings ("Don't delete things I wanted to keep around, jerk") and found nothing. I then just decided to try... search. And it worked. Found the article. But I have no idea where it "lived". That was really disconcerting.
So, mixed bag. I like that it's in sync but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm reading things in RSS with it - strange how the software makes it part of the appeal for me.
