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...