Three Mac Pieces, #2: The RSS Story
I loves my RSS feeds. I’ve been evangelizing feed readers to friends, parents, coworkers, people on the street, and pretty much anyone who will listen for several years. I used to show them NetNewsWire, but then that application went in a direction I wasn’t crazy about. NewsFire burst on the scene with a slick, minimal interface, and that became my new demo. NewsFire never did me no wrong.
When Safari RSS came along with Tiger, my converts asked me: “what’s up with that? Doesn’t that make more sense, RSS right there in the browser?” It’s no NewsFire, I said. I tried Safari RSS, briefly. I handed it my two hundred-odd feeds in one big folder, it choked, I sniggered and went back to my external reader. For in-browser RSS reading the Firefox extension Sage gets the job done, but it’s barebones and not Safari.
Lately my news reading has been taking more time than my busy self wants to spend. Clicking through hundreds of individual items and navigating NewsFire’s “sliding” iChat-like groups has not felt efficient. Flagged items linger in a Smart Group for days on end. Endless command-tabs between NewsFire and Safari. There has to be a better way.
It turns out that Safari RSS is the cat’s syndicated pajamas if you aren’t a jerk about it like I was. Do like this:
Get your feeds out of your feed reader. It’s got an OPML export option somewhere.
Follow the instructions Jon Hicks contributed to Mac OS X Hints. It means, amusingly enough, downloading Firefox and the aforementioned Sage extension. Barebones, but practical.
CRITICAL STEP: if you have a shitton of feeds, like me, take the time to organize them into folders! The organization will help you navigate your feeds and it’ll prevent Safari from barfing on the next step.
For the initial run, open each folder of imported feeds as tabs. This lets Safari recognize them as RSS feeds. If you’ve had some feeds around for many moons you might find that they’ve been redirected and maybe your old feed reader wasn’t catching that.
Love in the in-browser feed goodness.
It’s way faster. You can browse great big swaths of news and it marks them read without clicking through every item. Sure there are ways to do this in a dedicated feed reader, but I get through more content more quickly in Safari RSS. I like the way it looks, and I like how sensible it becomes to inspect and add new feeds to my collection.
Adding the RSS plugins linked at Pimp My Safari, another fine Jon Hicks resource, will make it behave like your old feed reader, only more so. Enjoy.