» Monday, 30 March A.D. 2009
on rss
I twittered about giving up Google Reader recently. I had a short exchange with Ryan in which I think he feared that I was burying my head in the sand. Herb blogged some thoughts about my decision and I was DM'd about my decision as well. So herewith is the larger context of my decision.
I am not burying my head in the sand; I am still following a moderately large list of feeds, but I'm doing it with Venus instead of letting Google automate my life. I still have my Gmail account. I purchased a G1, knowing full well that it would want to autosync a good chunk of my data to Google's servers. However, I have sync turned off and the account for my phone is a different one than the account I normally use for email. Paranoid? Maybe.
With Venus, I get to decide when I read my feeds. I realize that I have this choice with Reader. Having Reader open 24-7, however, changes the decision process--it's always there, it won't hurt if I check. It's like having a second email account. With Venus, it's consciously deciding, “Hey, I'm going to go tap commands into my terminal and wait for a while while it checks everything for me.” The psychology behind the decision is quite different. Now, if only I could make the same sort of psychological barriers in place for checking email...
Granted, I had to put in some elbow grease to make Venus work. Venus uses html5lib for some form of HTML normalization. I'm sure that it does wonderful normalization according to the HTML5 specification, but browsers today don't really handle HTML5. (Hint: <b></b> is not the same as <b/> to a modern browser.) So I had to write some cleanup scripts to make rendering work right. I also had to chase down some strange bugs with the Genshi templating bits that made the first parts of feeds come out duplicated. Which wasn't so bad, except for getting a double dose of every Bunny comic. (I find it humorous that's the first hit on Google for “bunny”.) And even that was not always unpleasant. But just knowing that there was a bug compelled me to fix the bug.
But besides the psychological aspect, the “share” button was way too tempting. It was tempting to share an article discussing some philosophy or policy or whatever and know that said article would show up in the “inbox” of a person who did not share that philosophy or policy or whatever. It was the internet equivalent of cluster bombing. I'm fairly sure sharing the articles I did didn't change the minds of the intended readers, much less were the articles read in the first place. (Don't worry, dear reader, you were not the intended target.) I don't have a “share” button with Venus and I think that's a good thing. Furthermore, reading what other people thought were interesting articles...meh. I haven't missed them.
I read my feeds once, maybe twice a day now. Minus a couple of hours of ranting at Venus for being braindead prior to fixing the issues cited above, I'm enjoying my choice. And if I can't access my feeds because I don't have my computer with me, I don't think that's a particularly bad thing.
posted by Nate @ 1:49PM