So I’ve only been playing with this a few hours. This isn’t the be-all, end-all of the RSS newfeed thing.
First, let me say that the My Yahoo RSS module is not very good. I don’t know where how it gets it’s automatic feeds when you search for things but they’re not quite right. The feed for my own site only seems to show the last post I made. Whereas, if you link directly to my feed (you’ll find it on the sidebar), you’ll see the last 10 posts. And it’s slow as all hell to update. It finally added the post I made about two-and-a-half hours ago. (Of course that’s because I linked it directly to my RSS feed.) Wil Wheaton’s excellent site, however, is not showing the two posts he made today so far. Maybe by default it gets feeds from Feedster or one of these other sites that compiles lots and lots of blogs.
PulpFiction doesn’t have this problem. The Lite version, which is the one I’m using, will automatically check for new feeds every half hour.
I am having two problems with it right off the bat. First, it gets really slow after being on for a while with a couple hundred posts listed. Grabbing the elevator in scrollbar and dragging up and down really chugs. I just checked it again and I’m seeing it with only 43 messages in the Inbox.
The second problem is getting overwhelmed. Quite a while back–6 months ago maybe, I don’t really remember–I tried out NetNewsWire for a bit. I had the same problem with it. Posts keep coming in. The first time you run it, there will literally be hundreds of pages to look at. It takes hours to go through things. You finally get it down to something managable and the next day you’ve got hundreds more to look at.
I think some of it has to do with the different method of working. I added a feed for MacCentral which is one of the sites I read everyday. That one site alone might easily post 30 articles in one day. If I’m going to it through the web, I see the list of articles and only click on the ones I want to read. When I’m getting a feed to an RSS reader, all 30 articles show up as unread and unless I do something about them they sit there and multiply.
I’m not sure how to get around this. Maybe certain high volume sites like MacCentral, MacMinute, Fark, Boing Boing, need to stay web browse only. So I only click on the links I want to click on. Whereas something like Wil’s site that’s only updated one or twice a day is sent to the reader. I don’t know. I’m going to have to play with this more and think about it.