ZeFrank looks at Scrabble. I like to think my English is pretty damn good but I’ve always really sucked at Scrabble. Chess or Monopoly are more my things as far as board games go.

The Show with ZeFrank

Thunderbird as an RSS reader is dead. Here is why…

I’m a slave to my RSS feeds. I like to be the first (or almost the first) to see stuff. That’s just how I am. Google Reader is an online feed-reader created by, funnily enough, Google. I’ve switched over from Thunderbird to Google Reader and I’ll never look back. This isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison though. One is a standalone application that needs to be installed and can only really be used on one pc. The other is an AJAXy Web 2.0 application that can be run wherever you have a web browser.

But first, what is an RSS feed? You may have a few favourite sites that you check every day. I know I do. Then there’s sites that you might check every month or so because they don’t update very often or whatever. However, holding a list of all these sites in your head can suck, especially when you forget about a site and it slips away. RSS feeds deliver updates to your favourite sites so they’re right your fingertips. Not only that but they pretty much get to you right away.

I used to use Thunderbird for my RSS feeds. Once per day I’d open it up, click get new messages, wait for my computer to go crazy (Thunderbird was really slow when fetching new messages) and then see the day’s RSS feeds. This was fine but there were a few things that were getting annoying:

When you start subscribing to quite a few feeds the list down the left hand side of all your sites can get very long and clumbersome to navigate. This happens a lot if you have feeds that aren’t updated very often (which I do).

I know that above example is rather benign but imagine having a whole screen’s worth of not-updated feeds and one or two updated ones. Imagine having Thunderbird open all day so only one or two feeds update at any one time. Heaps annoying!

How does Google Reader combat this? It just hides feeds that don’t have anything unread. Or in other words, you only see feeds for which there are new items. How simple!

And of course you’ll note that on the off-chance that you actually want to see an old feed then you just click the show all button.

My second annoyance, and one that I didn’t realise was a problem until I tried out Google Reader is retention. If you were using Thunderbird as I was and you only opened it once per day you were actually missing RSS items. For sites with many updates (eg. Kotaku, Blues News, CNet, Slashdot, etc.) this is a problem because there is actually no indication that you may have missed something. Because Google takes care of fetching the actual feeds for you, you won’t have any items fall down the crack.

The next thing is less of a Thunderbird annoyance and more of a Google feature. The problem is that the Thunderbird philosophy regarding RSS items is to treat them more or less the same as email messages. This is a fundamental design error (in my opinion, anyway) because people read RSS items differently to email. Using expanded view in Google Reader is great. It basically loads all the pages at once so you can scroll through without having to click on the individual RSS items. Compare browsing Lifehacker - which one is easier do you think?


Of course, Google Reader can do pretty much the same list view that Thunderbird does, except links open in a new tab (which could be a good or bad thing, depending on your preference).

If you’re familiar with Gmail’s starring system you’ll be right at home with Google Reader. See something you want to come back to? Just click on the star this post button and it’ll be added to your starred items. You can also click the share button on RSS items you find interesting and Google will create a webpage just with your shared items on it - an instant website without pretty much all the work done for you!

Finally of course there’s the keyboard shortcuts which makes going through all your items a snap. I’m still discovering better ways to do mine, I know that.

Overall, I’d suggest you just try it out! You don’t have to install anything, you can import your existing feeds from Thunderbird or pretty much any other RSS program - you just need a Google account, which is a piece of cake to get.

Recommended.

http://reader.google.com

Ok, last April Fool’s day post until next year!
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/P1/