Ah, the Holy Week, the time when the Catholic Filipino working class (be it lapsed or practicing) abandon their collective broomsticks, file-o’s and Pilots, plunk down on their collective asses in front of their collective idiot boxes and watch the same religious drivel they’ve been broadcasting for the past two decades for 5 days straight.
Of course, being neither Catholic nor idiot-box-addicted, I was working my ass off during the past 4 days. I’m now well into my 5th 14-hour work day, and boy am I feeling Holy.
But anyway, this isn’t about my personal adventures in Holy-Week-hackery, it’s about SharpReader, which is the dandy little application that’s been keeping me reasonably sane since Wednesday.
In ten words or less, SharpReader is an RSS aggregator implemented using the .NET framework. So what does this mean, for the average web-o? Well, to be honest, probably nothing, but I’d like to think that the people who visit this site are far from the “average web-o” anyway, so it’s highly likely that to you, it may mean something.
To understand RSS aggregation, you have to first understand the scenario it’s supposed to address. I’ll use my own situation as an example:
My basic online routine involves visiting anywhere between 4 to 6 dozen different websites every day, looking for news, images, links or whatever the hell else it is that may have caught my fancy at that particular time. If you visit this many sites, you probably know how annoying it is to a) click the bookmark and find that nothing has changed or, worse b) find that something really cool was posted on that site over a week ago and you missed it when it first came out.
If you’ve been in this situation before, you’ve probably wished that were some way that you could be automatically notified whenever a favorite site updated its content. (Automated email alerts are a simple but clunky solution for this, and not all sites can afford to email blast their thousands of members on a daily basis.) But being notified only solves half the problem, because then there’s the problem of wading through all of those notifications on a site-per-site basis. There has to be a way to merge all those notifications together into a single list that you can read through quickly, which is essentially what RSS Aggregation is all about.
The technology behind RSS is a bit too involved to explain fully here, but essentially all you need to know is that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is really just a simple text file containing all of the new content of a particular site. Here’s a screenshot of what Guttervomit’s RSS feed looks like, as an example:
Not exactly the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, I know, but fortunately RSS Aggregators can make sense of all that code and give you a decently-formatted content bucket to read. There are actually a whole bunch of RSS Aggregators available out there but so far, I’ve only tried the desktop-based SharpReader, and the web-based Kinja (both of which are free to use and very, very useful).
SharpReader in Action
The frame on the left shows a list of feeds I am currently subscribed to. There’s about 50 of them at the moment, and they’re all kinda clumped together under the default “Subscribed Feeds” category (you can sub-categorize them for more ordered viewing, of course).
The frame on the top-right shows the content titles. Clicking on the Subscribed Feeds category gives you a merged list of titles from all of the feeds in that category (in the screenshot, that’s a list of about a 1000 items, 800 of them currently unread). The frame on the bottom-right shows the actual content of the title you selected. In the screenshot, I’m currently reading an entry from Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick (yes, the Mark Cuban). Some RSS feeds give you the entire article’s content, while others only give you snippets. Either way, you get a pretty good idea of what the article is about before you actually visit the URL.
What makes SharpReader so special is that it’s extremely lightweight (less than a meg to download) and has a nice floating taskbar alert whenever new content comes in. It has pretty much all the stuff you need to make RSS viewing easier: folder categorization, item flagging, import/export functionality for sharing feeds lists, and some very useful item-filtering (so you can compare items with similar topics from different feeds).
The only downside is that it requires the .NET framework (which you can download here) in order to install, which is a bit of hassle for anyone who doesn’t keep their Windows box current. If you went to the trouble of downloading XP-SP2, you probably already have it though.
Grabbing a Feed
Once you’ve located the RSS link on your favorite site (it’s usually a button that says “RSS” or “XML” or “News Feed”), all you have to do is drag it from your browser and drop it into the SharpReader window. You can also right-click and “copy shortcut …”, then paste the link into SharpReader’s address bar. Then just click “Subscribe” to keep that feed’s address in memory, and scan it periodically for updates.
That’s all there is to it, in a nutshell. You’ll have to give SharpReader a spin for a couple of weeks before you’ll really feel its effects. I can honestly say that it’s had a huge effect on the way I get stuff done online because it’s just easier, simpler and more cost-effective to have everything you need in one big list than to go hunting for it yourself every single day.
(Oh, and guttervomit’s feed is right here, in case you were wondering.)
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