Information Overload

Lately, I’ve been getting really tired of opening up the old NetNewsWire and finding over 300 items that I needed to get through. I know I’m not the only person out there feeling the pressure of information overload, but it’s just getting to the point where I don’t think it’s possible to keep up with it all. I love keeping up with all of the news on the interwebernet, but man…

Paul got me thinking about this with a post he made noting the move of his nearly all of his bookmarks to his RSS reader:

No longer do I need to maintain 300 miscellaneous bookmarks that clutter my browser. I can throw those really random ones to del.icio.us, keep the daily-reads and private bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar and direct the rest to an aggregator. Feeds have really changed the way that I browse in the past year that I have passionately been using RSS wherever it is to be found.

What I found works best for me is going the other way.

Instead of adding more to my RSS reader, I took out the major offenders like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit and moved them into my browser bookmarks bar. (side note: I got rid of Slashdot all together.) I think that reading sites made up of links is more natural than scrolling through RSS items – and I’ve found it to be much quicker. The real benefit, though, is that there’s less clutter obscuring the sites I read with less volume.

Another thing I decided to do was to stop saving feed items. Why save feed items for longer than they’re in the feed? That’s against the whole point of feeds: feeds are supposed to be fresh.

Finally, and more generally, I’m doing my best to Fight the Urge to Read Everything in Front of Me. I’m also trying not to to catalogue, store, share, or archive everything I come across. There will always be a way to find that link again… If it was important anyway… If not, I figure it’s better to just toss it and consider your life “simplified”.

Alex King Leaves FeedLounge

One of the two creators of the ambitious FeedLounge web-based RSS reader has left the team. You can read the announcement (or here), which makes it sound as though there was some internal tension or something on how best to move the project forward.

Ultimately, the choice for me to leave was very hard, but one I felt had to be made. Despite hard work and the best of intentions, the level of service we were providing to our FeedLounge customers was just not something I was comfortable putting my name behind.

Utimately, however, the problem with Feedlounge is something I pointed out just about a year ago. The site is just too slow.

I’m sorry to report that I’m giving up on FeedLounge (at least for now). Things are just moving too slow for me, and I’m heading back to NetNewsWire.

I love the idea of an RSS reading web app, but after using FeedLounge exclusively for a while, I opened up NNW and realized that I had to move back to a client side app.

Really, I can just get through my feeds faster that way. Plus, there is the ability to refresh feeds on demand. Also, the pricing seems like it’ll be more than the 24.95 flat charge on NNW, which is understandable, but also… well… more!

I’ll try FeedLounge again once you guys get the extra equipment that’s supposed to make things faster, but I just wanted to give you an honest opinion of the service up to this point.

Thanks again!

Quite a shame, because there is a lot of great stuff in FeedLounge, and Alex seems like a great developer. Maybe Scott will be able to turn things around, but I’m not too sure this is a good sign.

Internet Soul Portraits

There’s an interesting gallery of well known webpages that have been stripped of their goodies. The collection includes such favorites as Yahoo (above), eBay, CNN, and Google. Visit site »

explodingdog

If you haven’t seen explodingdog yet, you’re really missing out.

Visit the site »

Centering a Page with CSS

There’s a very simple way to center a web-page horizontally, using only a smidgen of CSS:

body {
margin: 0px auto;
width: 760px;
}