Understanding Nothing

Every few months for the last 2 years I’ve gone on the hunt for an RSS aggregator. Every time I’ve been disappointed. Everything I’ve tried has been clumsy and kludgy and made my blog reading harder, rather than easier. And so I’ve stuck with the routine of actively visiting all the blogs I read (of course my fancy “last updated” blogroll scanner that I wrote myself in Perl helps a lot with not wasting time checking pages I know haven’t changed!)

Until now. Last week I came across SharpReader, loved it instantly, and one week on I’m still a fan.

The interface is the standard 3-pane Oulook-esque approach that most aggregators seem to take now, but it seems to do it better than most. Subscribing to feeds is also much easier than the clumsy approach many others take – you just drag a webpage from your web browser and it does the auto-discovery dance for you. (It also imports OPML so it was easy to get my initial sites set up).

You can categorise all the blogs into, erm, categories, and perform tasks on a universal, category-wide, or single blog basis (so, for example, I poll our internal work blogs at 15 minute intervals, blogs of poeple I know well every 30 minutes, keep most at the default hourly polling, and have some daily.

It also has feedster searching built in, and because feedster provides RSS search results, it’s trivial to subscribe to searches for topics that interest you. (This is also a great way to find new blogs to read regularly).

I have two major wishes for it, which I sent in email to the author (and received a response within an hour, saying that he liked both ideas and would try to get them in either the release that’s about to come out, or the next one!):

Firstly, I’d like the polling to be a bit more staggered. I have a lot of feeds, and every hour I get pop-up notifications telling me of all the changes – which can drag my computer significantly if there’s a lot of changes have happened in the last hour. I suggested that instead of waiting 60 minutes for the next poll it should wait for 60 minutes + rand(3). Over time the feeds will all start to drift apart, and be distributed all over the hour. I’ll get a constant stream of new articles all the time rather than a surge every hour.

Secondly, I’d really like to be able to mark articles to come back to later. At the minute I have to keep marking things as “unread” if it’s something I want to read in more depth.

But these are minor nits in a fantastic product, and now I can subscribe to lots of feeds that were just too much hassle to go check manually on a regular basis (such as the CPAN reviews of my various Perl modules!).

It used to be that when I returned from a week away, I’d have thousands of emails to work my way through – even after deleting spam. I’d also have a few web sites to visit to catch up on news.

These days it’s reversed. I was pretty much done with my mail in an hour or so, but it took me all morning to catch up on my weblog reading.

There’s two main reasons why this seems to have happened.

Firstly, I had virtually no work related mail to read. There’s only 4 of us working for Kasei, and we were all at the same conference.

Secondly, I don’t read anywhere near as many mailing lists as I used to. I used to keep up with technical topics via mailing lists. This took a lot of time, even on lists where I delete entire threads without reading them, based on the subject line.

These days, I tend to get the same information (or at least the highlights) from the weblogs I read. I still have to skip over information I’m not so interested in – but not anywhere near as much of it. And I also get a lot of pointers to stuff that would never have appeared on tightly-focussed mailing lists.

I can’t help but fear, however, that unless I refine this approach some more, this time next year I’d take a full day to catch up (even in skim mode). I’m adding 2 or 3 people to my blogroll every week on average, and only dropping people at the rate of 1 every couple of weeks.

When I read them “in real time”, via my regularly refreshed “last updated” blogroll, it’s not too hard to keep on top off. But when you don’t read for a week, almost everyone has updated, and it’s not easy to handle.

I have no idea what the solution is.

Scott comments on the update frequency of blogs: daily, I run thru a list of links and when I suspect they won’t be updated, I just skip over them.

Like Scott, I also don’t like aggregators. I played with them for a while, but they just didn’t fit the way I like to read, and, yes, I like to read “in context”, so to speak – I like browsing outwards from people’s blogrolls etc when I have some spare time.

Ever since I changed my blogroll to show me the last time something was updated, it’s been amazing. I no longer waste time visiting blogs that haven’t updated, and I also get to see when the less frequently updated blogs have changed. For me it’s the perfect solution.

Unfortunately it relies of having server side scripting capabilities (see my earlier description of how I did it), which probably rules out most Radio users. But I expect to see it in Movable Type any day now …

If there is one “scientific” discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind. I experience it as a liberating habit: without it, doing the work becomes one thing and writing it down another one, which is often viewed as an unpleasant burden. When working and writing have merged, that burden has been taken away.

The habit is also liberating in a much more profound sense. I consider, for instance, EWD975 on the Theorem of Pythagoras – of all theorems! – a major acievement of last semester. It was an unadulterated pleasure to write it; one of its recipients called it “absolutely bloodly marvellous”. Had I only written with publication in mind, it would never have seen the light of day. Not only would aforementioned recipient have been denied his enjoyment, I would have been so too: what I sent out was Sunday’s version, which I could only write after the discovery that I could still improve on Saturday’s version. The only way to discover that a neglected or ignored topic is worth writing about is to write about it.

The EWD-series seems a little unusual. If it is sufficiently unusual to represent a novel style of doing science, the development of that style may be one of my major contributions.

– EWD1000

Jeremy wants to know how to get Use.Perl journals’ RSS feeds. Yes, the documentation is incorrect (or at least out of date). The way that seems to work at present is:

http://use.perl.org/journal.pl?content_type=rss&uid=10878

To get the number (10878) from the name (matts) involves going to the person’s journal page (http://use.perl.org/~matts/journal/), and hovering over one of the little yellow smileys and reading the uid from the status bar at the bottom of your browser!

No, it’s not what I would call easy, simple or obvious! :)

Also, the RSS feed produced uses <dc:date> as the identifier for the last update (most other blogging tools use <lastBuildDate>), so my fancy “when was this page last updated” tool needed modified for them also…) [Later: Doh! The "date" is NOW, not the last update. Doesn't seem like there's any way to get last update time from the RSS at all...]

Everyone seems to be pointing to Meg’s column “What We’re Doing When We Blog”.

The “a-ha” moment for me was the paragraph:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of “page”), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

As Jonathon keeps pointing out “blogging can offer infinitely more than journalism”. I think this is one of the major differences. Blogging is mostly just sharing thoughts. Thoughts that, if you had to write 400 words on, whould never escape your own head. But in a format that allows, encourages, and even expects you to write less than 100 words, the thought gets written.

Of course, most of these thoughts probably aren’t really worth sharing.

But they’re out there. Waiting for someone to pick them up and expand on them or refute them.

Andrew wants to know how you know who’s replying to your weblog posts.

I’ve found that people take two main approaches. Some people email you, either to discuss your post, or, most often, to point you to the response they’ve written in their blog. Others just link to you, and wait for you to find out through your refer(r)er logs.

Emailing seems to almost go against the spirit of “conversation via weblog”, but I’m not sure that the “find me through your logs” approach isn’t a little too subtle.

Hmmm … can I access previous days referer log entries in Radio? Must investigate…

I’ve been talking to quite a few people about the whole intersection of wikis, blogs and outliners over the last few days.

Bill Seitz, who writes his Blog within a wiki talks about viewing wiki pages as OPML.

Ken MacLeod has created a Blog macro for MoinMoin.

Aaron of Montreal has created OTLML for Outliner Markup to help address some of the perceived shortcomings in OPML.

Chris and Earl over at Vanilla have also been doing some interesting work on WikiLogs.

But, I have to say, a lot of this disturbs me somewhat.

In particular, I’m not convinced by the idea of blogging within a wiki.

I think a wiki works best in DocumentMode, where the information is truly collectively owned, and the incremental tweaks of many visitors create a coherent whole. ThreadMode, on the other hand, where each person merely adds their thoughts rather than shaping the collective consensus, makes it much more difficult to follow, with many of the dead-ends, sidetracks, and disagreements that are so prevalent on mailing lists or usenet.

In “conversation mode”, weblogs, although a stage removed from mailing lists etc, still require an interested party to follow many avenues of investigation and thought. This is not a bad thing. But a wiki can be more than that. It represents a consensus of opinion (even when there is no consensus!) It’s the summary of many conversations. Eventually most ThreadMode wiki pages are expected to be refactored into DocumentMode.

And, in “history mode”, weblogs are a useful record of your thoughts and ideas over time. In many ways they should be sacrosanct. Editing an entry from several months or years ago to reflect your current thinking is bad form.

So I’m starting to see almost a progression path – from outline to blog to wiki. It’s already happening at one level with some of the people publishing their outlines. Dave Winer promotes thoughts from his instant outline to his Scripting News weblog – presumably ones which he believes deserve a wider readership. The bigger, more widely relevant(?) issues, he writes up into DaveNet pieces, where he can craft more coherent whole articles.

Some people’s “end of line” publishing is to a page which enables readers to add comments (ThreadMode). However, by replacing that final step with publishing to a Wiki, in Document mode, you can truly release your thoughts, allowing the community to tweak, adapt and extend your ideas in a wholly different way. This is the power of a wiki.

But, to twist back to the beginning, I’m starting to see real value in wiki pages, once settled in Document Mode, being expressed as outlines. The ability to see the main points at a glance, and drill down for the information you want, is invaluable.

So, in some ways, an outline is both the best start point and the best end point. But to make that progression I believe that the information needs to be freed from the inherent constraints of outlining.

I’m sure there are parallels for this elsewhere, but I can’t think of any right now …