RSS Readers lose the art of the site
I use the Google Reader RSS reader. Its a great reader, easy to use and clearly presented. Its awesome that if you read from several different machines it keeps track of what you’ve read. Of course, its Google!. I read a few feeds (not as many as Mcq, wow, he’s a pro) so a reader is a nice way to keep up with the changes. Much more sensible than going to a site just to see if anything has changed.
When you use a reader though, you lose so much of the formatting of the post. Its like, “all that matters is the text content”. OK you get the pictures too (generally, but not always), but what you lose is the art of the site. I spent a lot of time choosing a template for my blog site, which like many of you acts also as my home page, and further time tweaking it. For example, I widened it a little so the posts would sit with nicer proportions and accommodate a larger picture easily. And I did some novice CSS hacking so all the posts were automatically fully justified. I like the look of my site and appreciate the look of others’.
Funny, when I first starting learning about RSS and readers, I assumed they’d just inform you of a new post but that you’d always go the site to read, or that somehow the site would be embedded in your reader.
Well I guess its the same as using a book reader for a PDA vs. the actual book. Me, I like the tactile nature of books, the smell and weight of the paper, the way you can flip to find where you last left off because the binding naturally tells you. I like magazines so you can sit in a comfy chair or in the tub. I’ve tried reading from a laptop in the tub but its uncomfortable, and despite the fact it was on batteries, Patti thought it just looked dangerous (at least for the laptop!). I marvel at font choices. I love the art of presentation.
The substance must be there too, but must we throw away the aesthetic connection for convenience?
April 13th, 2007 at 4:21 am
So glad to see you back posting!
April 13th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Thanks, I have a very demanding readership
April 13th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I actually prefer the homogeneity of the feeds in most ‘aggregators’. For me, for blogs, it’s all about the content, and I could care less about the visual style.
It’s not really Google Reader’s fault, per se. They are showing you the content of the feed, not the web site. They aren’t ’stripping anything’ (actually, that’s not quite true, but close enough). The way the UI works for GR, there’s not really any way, I can think of, that they’d show you the original web site instead of the homogeneous post.
I think Thunderbird has an option to show you the post by displaying the web site at the permalink, though not getting cross-machine synchronization is not ‘free’.
April 14th, 2007 at 5:15 am
As you know, I am a convert to e-books. Paper books just take up space in your house (/em thinks of Deb) and the “weight” of it in your hand is something I don’t miss at all. I know of at least one case where someone had to stop reading p-books because carpal tunnel had made it too painful to hold them.
The other thing I like about e-books is that they allow the reader to control the appearance of the book. I mostly use eReader Pro, which allows you to “skin” the book by changing fonts, colors and background images. In practice, I don’t play around with this much, but I will say that being able to change every book I own into a “large print edition” just by changing the font size has become increasingly important as I grow older.