Tags
alarm, feed, notification, push, reader, RSS, RSS-reader, status
Despite the huge amount of love I put into my last post about the advantages of RSS, I had to find out that a good friend of mine still reads his IT-news on cluttered, ad-overloaded webpages.
His argument: The RSS-reader he tried once showed him only two lines of information in the overview and when he wanted to read more, it started to load the whole webpage. The latter turned out to be very slow, so he was faster to go to the webpage in the first place.
My answer: Bad RSS-reader! A good RSS-reader preloads a certain portion of the article to be accessible at the snap (swipe) of a finger. Take a look at this:
Admittedly in many cases the two lines of text in the list view aren’t enough to decide if an article is worth a reading. But with this kind of preview you are surely able to estimate.
I found out that in 90% of the cases I do not need to load the webpage. Either I already read enough or found the article not to be interesting.
And with the 10% of the news at which I want to read even more – well, that’s worth the three second wait.
I’ve already wrote a lot about the advantages of reading news via RSS last time, so I’m not going to repeat them here. There’s only “one more thing” I didn’t mention before: Getting Push-notifications for news that match a keyword you defined (can be activated in the application settings).
Why is this a power-feature? Imagine this: You have a web-account with a given hosting-provider (let’s say WebFaction) and this provider offers you status informations via RSS-Feed (like http://statusblog.webfaction.com/feed/). What you can do now is to define a keyword that matches your hostname (like “web007”) and whenever there is a status info for this host, you will receive a notification on your phone (so if necessary you can take appropriate steps) 🙂
Newsbar iOS version
Newsbar Mac version