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Read this!
Needless to say, I read feeds. Kind of a lot of them.
But lately I’ve started to think about what I’m missing — like design and context for starters — in my feed reader. I started thinking about how a site-based (rather than feed-based) “reader” would look and act.
Here’s what I thought:
- It would center around a list of links
- It would keep track of which sites I’d been to (i.e. mark them as “read”)
- It would tell me when a site had been updated
- It would track my usage so I can tweak my reading list and habits over time
This weekend I had a little free time, so I put together a simple web app that does #1 and most of #2. The image above shows what it looks like. Here’s a video (Quicktime, 51s, 1.9MB) of how it works.
It’s definitely a first draft, and of course I have a few improvements in mind already.
For instance: The state (i.e. which links I’ve clicked) is stored in browser memory, so if I leave the page that’s lost. I plan to store my “session” in the database, so I can read a couple of sites in the morning and then check back after lunch to hit the rest.
It also doesn’t tell me which sites have been updated. I’m not really sure how to do this yet… so I haven’t.
I’ve only been using it “for real” for a few hours, and already noticed one unexpected advantage — I can read high-volume sites like Chicagoist again! I couldn’t keep up with the feed, but I love browsing the site a couple of times a day.
So, that’s what I did this weekend. Nerdy, huh? Oh, I also saw Brent and Matt in the marathon. They looked great.