The Ocean, The Shower, and The Pool

The Ocean Google reader for my 484 public feeds.
The Shower Vienna (OSX) for my private, constantly updated feeds.
(If I were on a pc, I’d be using sharp reader.)
The Pool Google reader shared items sidebar for my shared feeds.

Reading feeds has caused much dissonance in my life lately. I want a single solution to do too many different things. This makes me dissatisfied with any single solution. So I have been attempting to hack a single solution into submission. But no submission, only dissonance. Until now.

I ran across a post by Alex King that set me on the path towards feed reading harmony. Reading 484 feeds on a client is a drain on resources (processor and HD), and is useless for tracking updates. I turned that feature off 384 feeds ago, becuase it wasn’t telling me anything useful. It was just noise. Noise that leads to dissonance. Now, with only 40-ish highly personalized feeds, I can care if there are 28 new posts in the last 2 hours. These are feeds of comments, feed searches for dydimustk, web service feeds (i.e. facebook, twitter, etc. ), wiki update feeds etc. Highly personalized information that I don’t mind other people looking at, but dont’ particularly need to share.

I have been a long time tester, user, and fan of NetNewsWire. So, it was a bittersweet moment when I decided to switch to Vienna. But I feel I need to put my support and faith and energy towards opensource software. Vienna is opensource. NetNewsWire is not.

Google reader is great for sharing posts with others, I can even drop a sidebar on my blog now that lists my shared articles. Awesome. Done. However, Reader left me disatisfied becuase there are enough times I am offline, that an online reader wasn’t enough. As you know that has changed. So, feed reading harmony.

My final challenge is to develop a solution for saving links for later. You know, blog fodder. Or references. Preferably, I’ll find or create an offline del.icio.us client.

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