Here’s one for the programmers out there:
I subscribe to 141 RSS feeds. Some of them have new content every once in a while. Others have a double-dozen or more new posts every day. All of it is, of course, impossible to keep up with, but I have so many subscriptions because I thought it was a good idea to have them in Google Reader and therefore searchable.
Well, heck, they’d be searchable in Google anyway, wouldn’t they? So, that doesn’t really stand up for me. Also, reading them all would not only take an inordinate amount of time, it usually isn’t worth the time invested for the information returned.
Still… I like the little surprises found perusing my Google Reader every day — I don’t necessarily want to subscribe to fewer feeds. On the other hand, I don’t want to waste a bunch of time reading them every day.
So. Here’s what I’d love to see:
An RSS reader that pulls X number of posts at random from those that are unread and only shows those posts, and no others, in an X-hour period.
For example: I set up this hypothetical (for now?) reader to deliver 10 posts and for the time period to be 12 hours. I open the reader at 8:00 AM on Monday. It gives me ten posts chosen at random from all the feeds I’m subscribed to. I read those posts. If I open it up again at 11:00 AM, I get the same ten posts! If I open it at 8:01 PM on Monday, I get ten new unread posts.
What’s the point?
There are a couple:
- Prevent the use of RSS feeds as a procrastination tool keeping me from more productive pursuits like writing or pursuing clients or mowing the lawn or what-have-you. Other than the x number of posts viewed in an x-hour period, everything else is out-of-sight and, therefore, out-of-mind.
- Make my feeds a source of surprise and delight rather than information overload and that strange feeling of obligation to read every damn thing. Instead, I get x number of pieces of new information and stop, happy in the notion that x more will be waiting for me in x hours.
That’s that. I envision this as being something that could be either web-based (something in php + mysql or cgi or whatever — that’s for you to figure out) or a cross-platform desktop app (maybe an Adobe AIR app?) Maybe it even works with my existing Google Reader… but since part of the goal is to wean myself from the “river of news” that has breached its levy, maybe that’s not such a good idea…
Anyone who wants to run with it as an open source, / Creative Commons project, rock on. Just credit me with the idea.
Thanks, programmers!
Possibly related posts:
If you get this made and will share, I’d want an option for certain feeds to only show the oldest posts. Why? Webcomics. Unless it is a random, non-sequential comic, it would be read out of order.
Unrelated: The reCaptcha says ‘Hearsay Louis’. That character should be in someone’s story.
Indeed, a great idea. I was also thinking, after I wrote this post, that the ability to set it up to choose the x number of posts from a search of keywords might be good, too. You could have an 8 AM result that returned ten posts on “writing” and an 8 PM result that returned ten posts on “webcomics,” for example.
If an enterprising developer tackles this, I recommend they begin with the basics mentioned in my post… future versions can add more bells and whistles, so long as the basic idea of limiting the number of posts and the frequency of accessing them is maintained.
And sharing is built in! This should be an open-source, GPL or CC-licensed thing.
Hi Matt,
That is an intriguing idea. I saved the post and I’m going to refer back to it when I have more of my PHP skills up. I love the idea of it.
Something that might work for you, not completely what you were thinking, but there is an add-on to Firefox called feedly (http://feedly.com). I’ve just started using it, and it has some improvements over Google Reader: each feed can have its own view, you can use just a digest version, that would show a finite version, etc. Like I said, it’s not completely what you were thinking, but might be a little closer.
Thanks for the suggestion, Jim — I’ll give Feedly a look! Meanwhile I’m messing around with learning programming myself (don’t suggest a problem unless you can attempt a solution, right?) so we’ll see where that goes. Folks who already have the chops should certainly not let that dissuade them, as it will be quite a while before I know what I’m doing..!
It’s not an *exact* match (and it’s payware too), but I kinda like how Fever handles things:
http://feedafever.com/
(FWIW, I use Google Reader with NetNewsWire as the client front end)
Hiya, Chris! Y’know, Fever is interesting, but I’m not interested in reading what the rest of the web thinks is worth reading. I think RSS feeds are about as personal an information channel as you can get, and if I was only exposed to the posts the rest of the world thought were cool, all I’d be reading is i09 top-ten lists and BoingBoing…
I’m (kinda) kidding, but you get me. Having a random selection would have to be one of the core features of this thing I’m thinking of. (Which needs a name, by the way. Anyone?)
If anything, NetNewsWire gets close to the other side of things – you can make a smart list that’s just “20 unread articles.” The downside is that there isn’t a way (yet) to isolate the smart list to one unread article per feed. I subscribe to lot of feeds (490 right now) and of those 18 post more than 20 items a day (five of these are high-volume torrent tracker feeds) so this would rapidly fill up with random posts from one blog while ignoring the others.