In the spirit of real-time information consumption, I have done some explorations into how I consume information and where I could speed things up and/or make them more efficient. Actually, I would look to optimize anything that I have to do repeatedly.
I subscribe to over 1000 feeds so doing a full NetNewsWire refresh provides me with thousands of unread items. Needless to say that’s a bit daunting and far from efficient. I have organized them into groups but haven’t found that to help me in the daily reading of my top priority feeds let alone speeding up their delivery to me – refreshing is so last decade. So I looked at other distribution options and mechanisms.
One of the logical ways of speeding up the delivery and consumption, at least logical to me and my workflows, was to incorporate RSS and email. Email finds me wherever I am and in a push fashion so as long as I have connectivity, so feed items coming to me via email will get noticed and read.
Now, many sites enable Feedburner’s email delivery mechanism but I find that there is a delay between the publishing time of the post and when I actually get the email – sometimes it’s under an hour, and other times it’s into the several hours range. Frustrating, inefficient, and not ideal by any means.
A quick Google search later and I found these two services: feedmyinbox.com and rss2m.com
Ok, time for a quick rant sidebar regarding these two services:
1. rss2e.com: As a free user, you can only add a paltry 5 feeds. Problem is, they don’t even provide you a way of upgrading your account. So there is no way to give them money to get what you could want. Again, what is it with these companies that refuse to provide you with ways to pay for what you want.2. feedmyinbox.com: Their pricing plan beaks down as follows: same paltry 5 feeds for free, 25 feeds for $5/month, 75 feeds for $10/month, and unlimited for $16/month. Seriously? I cannot imagine anyone who uses RSS to have less than 75 feeds. I suppose one could argue that you wouldn’t want more than the 25 or 75 feeds emailed to you but that doesn’t click for me. In reality they are really offering a free trial so you can kick the tires and a $16/month all you can eat plan and two useless plans. I can only conclude this is just a failure of customer and space analysis on their part. So, their problem is that they’re both pay services in a space where free reigns supreme, and they’re not offering anything of real value: $16 a month to get what Google Reader + Feedburner do for free clearly isn’t going to work. Thankfully I also found rss2email at http://rss2email.infogami.com/blog/ from Aaron Swartz who is a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification and also co-authored Markdown among other things, so I figured it was going to be helpful. In a nutshell, i’s a group of python files which you can run on any OSX machine or better yet, on a remote server so it can run and keep sending you emails even when your machine is disconnected or powered down. So, I put it up on my server, added a bunch of my favorite reads, set it to run on a cron (I opted for every 15 minutes) and voila, near real-time email updates. I’ve been using this system for a few days and am so pleased with it that I am starting to migrate my Feedburner subscriptions to rss2email. Here’s the instructions which do involve a touch of command line, http://rss2email.infogami.com/getstarted , and a good write up from CLI Magazine, http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/2141200 One final note, I am definitely interested and closely following what happens with the PubSubHubbub protocol as that will hopefully speed things even more.
Ok, time for a quick rant sidebar regarding these two services:
1. rss2e.com: As a free user, you can only add a paltry 5 feeds. Problem is, they don’t even provide you a way of upgrading your account. So there is no way to give them money to get what you could want. Again, what is it with these companies that refuse to provide you with ways to pay for what you want.2. feedmyinbox.com: Their pricing plan beaks down as follows: same paltry 5 feeds for free, 25 feeds for $5/month, 75 feeds for $10/month, and unlimited for $16/month. Seriously? I cannot imagine anyone who uses RSS to have less than 75 feeds. I suppose one could argue that you wouldn’t want more than the 25 or 75 feeds emailed to you but that doesn’t click for me. In reality they are really offering a free trial so you can kick the tires and a $16/month all you can eat plan and two useless plans. I can only conclude this is just a failure of customer and space analysis on their part. So, their problem is that they’re both pay services in a space where free reigns supreme, and they’re not offering anything of real value: $16 a month to get what Google Reader + Feedburner do for free clearly isn’t going to work. Thankfully I also found rss2email at http://rss2email.infogami.com/blog/ from Aaron Swartz who is a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification and also co-authored Markdown among other things, so I figured it was going to be helpful. In a nutshell, i’s a group of python files which you can run on any OSX machine or better yet, on a remote server so it can run and keep sending you emails even when your machine is disconnected or powered down. So, I put it up on my server, added a bunch of my favorite reads, set it to run on a cron (I opted for every 15 minutes) and voila, near real-time email updates. I’ve been using this system for a few days and am so pleased with it that I am starting to migrate my Feedburner subscriptions to rss2email. Here’s the instructions which do involve a touch of command line, http://rss2email.infogami.com/getstarted , and a good write up from CLI Magazine, http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/2141200 One final note, I am definitely interested and closely following what happens with the PubSubHubbub protocol as that will hopefully speed things even more.
