Readicule

Update: Not too long after I wrote this, The Old Reader subsequently got some kind of support/backing and remains functioning as of this writing (October 2013) and I continue to be a generally satisfied user)

I feel compelled to keep updating the sad tale of my inability to land on a suitable solution for my incredibly non-complicated RSS reading needs.

The tale itself isn't so interesting, I know.  The topic was suitably done to death in the wake of Google's cheerful announcement of its impending murder of Reader and I've read all the same solutions everyone else had.  It's just that I fooled around with most of them and didn't like something about almost all of them and apparently I'm not in a minority here because we all tried to pile on top of The Old Reader and capsized it.  Le Sigh. So now I have to start over again and what gets to me is about how this is all about how I never bothered to really get it.


So I read something like the recent Metafilter thread about The Old Reader and there are basically three sorts of comments, those that are saying yes, I too cannot seem to stabilize my RSS situation post-Google-Reader and those saying Just Use Newsblur and those saying People it is not that complicated, you merely need to spend five minutes frantulating the lemuel settings, pick up some two dollar a year hosting and strap up your own cretchwell server.  Of course this is not what they are actually saying but I want to stress that there is no practical difference, for me, between what they are saying and that.  They are saying it is simple enough to Do It Yourself and you know, it is just not true for the rest of us.  But spending $5 a month to facilitate my reading things on the internet just seems like a lot of BS.

There is the weird broad swath in computer technology still where it is too complicated for me to do myself without spending considerable time on self-education that I just am not willing to spend but where there is either no commercial solution at all or what is offered just doesn't seem like a damn reasonable price.  For what RSS does for me five dollars a month is not a reasonable price. And eventually, because keeping up is a pain and I do want to keep up, with a few things, I will make one of the free solutions work, but jeeze, I've been through this three times already.

Presumably this will be updated again at some point...

reading, coda

Aaaah so anyway after NewsBlur annoyed me, twice, I gave up and tried out The Old Reader which I was avoiding for some reason even though on reflection of everything I read about it it was pretty obvious that it was pretty much all I looking for.  I just want a list that tells me which of the slight selection of things I follow has something new.  It seems to be working just fine with relatively little learning curve.  The end?

Reeding, feeding, bleeding and misleeding...

I pretty much know myself in this strange life on the wire we're all collectively hallucinating so it did not come as a surprise to me to discover today that, sure enough, I let Google Reader expire without asserting an alternative.  I was hoping whoever was in charge of Reeder would punt something for the desktop application in time for the switch but this did not occur.

I don't know, this does not seem to me to be a thing which should require an application that I pay for to accomplish, but this possibly seems to be (as I read the descriptions of all these various alternatives) because I used Reader in this incredibly bone-headed, simplistic way, as just a list of updates on a fairly discrete number of blogs and websites.  All the blah-blah-blah about social and subfolders and the mobile app makes me want to take a nap.  I just want to know when one of less than 30 things posts and update okay?  I don't want to share, promote, or recommend anything, at least not from there.  I don't want you to curate any news for me or show me Around the Web.

Should I be milling around at some lower level of the RSS protocol?  It seems like this is something that my browser should just do for me for free without a lot of set up and hassle.  Maybe it's more complicated than I understand.  I can feel myself getting seriously generation-gapped on this one, even my basic paradigm - reading inside the browser on a desktop computer -is hopelessly mired in the last decade's paradigm.

Meanwhile, looking at what I was actually following (all laid out in plain XML courtesy of Google Takeout) it boils down to:

2 of my own blogs (I think I put them on originally just to see how updating was working)
3 blogs that update regularly
3 blogs that have not been updated in a really long time
11 blogs that are infrequently and irregularly updated (some of which are no doubt on their way to joining the previous 3 in the category prior to this one)
2 apparently defunct webcomics
2 webcomics that update consistently on a fixed schedule
1 very routinely updated art and design website with a tumblr-ish output
1 artist's tumblr that updates infrequently with long pauses
1 artist's tumblr that updates far too frequently and I'm only interested in about 5% of the material
1 personal page of a moderately famous person who posts everything they blog to Google Plus anyway
and an ongoing video series that tends to update the YouTube well in advance of its own site and posts everything new on Plus anyway.

Not totally sure I have a problem to solve after all.