RSSing again

I've decided to use an RSS feed thingy again. I used Bloglines last time, but couldn't really deal with it. However, now that I visit enough sites, I'm giving it another try.

I'll tell you why I don't like using RSS feed aggregators, in genral. Each website displays its content in its own distinctive way. I've gotten used to that. When I go the washingtonpost.com I know what I expect to see, how I expect the layout to look. RSS feed aggregators only work with text, so every website I see looks exactly the same.

Another thing I like about visiting a website is that the content doesn't disappear. News aggregators tend to favor reacting to what's there right now. For example, suppose I look at the RSS feed for Washington Post. There's ten articles. I glance at one of them. I leave. Oh, but now it thinks I've read everything. Well, I haven't. Real websites don't make their content disappear like this.

They should follow a model that's closer to reddit, where I can check things per RSS entry. Either yes, I've read it, no I haven't, or I don't care to read it. If I don't check it, then it should be there next time I visit.

RSS aggregators base their behavior on news readers which tend to behave the same way. This may work well for many, but it doesn't work well for me.

I may have to go around and try a bunch of them, or just do what I normally do, which is to visit site after site.

Oh yeah, I tried rojo. What a mess. It puts all the subscriptions together in one big mess. There's no obvious sense that I have clearly decided to subscribe to different things. I added, for example, Joel on Software. Where was the tab for that feed? Missing. Thanks guys.

Of course, most of these places have no obvious documentation. This has become the wave of the now. In the past, few things needed documentation because the operations didn't change a whole lot. An iron basically behaved the same way, regardless of where you got it from. Software, of course, must offer you a hundred undocumented variations, forcing you to go around and tinker and ask "Why the hell did they add this feature? What made them think that I wanted it to do that? Why is an obvious feature missing?"

I've just downloaded Omea, which is a desktop reader. It looks OK. It vaguely resembles Outlook, which could be worse. So far, it looks the best, which is sad, because it means I've grown accustomed to how Outlook does things.

I'm going to check out this other photo website, and see how I like it.

(This, too, I find irritating. There's now so many websites that I have to investigate to see which one I like. It's a pain, I tell you).