Don’t you love a good generic Internet Explorer error message? That big red X bubble always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Especially when it pops up every time I open a new IE browser window. Ugh.

I’ve been using Nick Denton’s Kinja as my RSS feed reader of choice for the last two years or so. It’s my start page for IE (yes, I’m running IE6 at work for development purposes, along with Firefox 2, Safari 3, and Opera, as well as IE7 on my laptop and Safari on my iPhone — working in web development sucks sometimes); in Firefox, I use my del.icio.us bookmarks as a start page.

Kinja’s concept is pretty simple. To quote their about page,

Kinja is a weblog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.

Considering the fact that their blog hasn’t been updated since February of 2006, I think it’s safe to say that no one over at Gawker has any serious interest in maintaining the site on a regular basis. This is somewhat disappointing, since the digest form is a very nice way to read a sampling of blog posts updated regularly. What it boils down to is that I use the digest as my main RSS reader, but I completely ignore the rest of the site, and the digest form of reading feeds really appeals to me. I have a limited attention span when it comes to reading blog posts, and I have a large OPML file of over 250 blogs that I keep track off and on.

There are obviously a select few out of that bunch that I actually read on a regular basis, and a slightly larger percentage that are updated frequently (once a day or more often than that.) I enjoy reading feeds more when I only skim the surface — a newly posted article may catch my eye, but for the most part I prefer to only see a selection of the most recent posts, and not all at once. I’ve tried more popular web-based readers like iGoogle, Newsgator, Start.com (before it got eaten by the Windows Live site), My Yahoo!, and a variety of others. None of them impressed me all that much — they’re great in terms of configurability, and when it comes to the ability to display a hundred tiny, illegible blog posts at once on a single page, they do an excellent job. However, that’s not what I want to see. The digest form presented by Kinja forces me to see a select few, recent items in more detail, and allows me to concentrate at home and at work without spending hours reading feeds left and right.

The problem I see now is that between IE6 support dwindling (which is great, but I still have to support it for the time being, which means I still need to run it on a regular basis), and the lack of site maintenance going on at Kinja, it looks I’m going to have to find myself another good RSS reader sooner than later. Thankfully I can export my hundreds of feeds as an OPML file from Kinja and import it elsewhere… the downside is that I have yet to discover another feed reader that gives me the same sort of flexibility and clean interface that Kinja provides.

So I guess what I’m asking is: does anyone have any suggestions for a solid digest feed reader?

Googling feed readers provides reams and reams of useless sites. Doing the same search and appending digest just filters the results down to Reader’s Digest and a bunch of other useless links. There are so many mediocre RSS readers out there that the field is overflowing with crap. I’m looking for quality over quantity and so far I’m not succeeding. I’ve even toyed with the idea of rolling my own public reader to present a decent alternative to Kinja, but after my experience working with various open-source and .NET based RSS toolkits, as well as the RSS integration we recently added to ThoughtFarmer over at my day job, I’ve taken a step back from that ledge, for good reason.

RSS is a simple yet nasty format to work with; solely because of the huge mess of different specifications available, it presents a giant nightmare of slightly varied yet overlapping implementations out there. Consuming RSS is a bitch. How RSS handles date formats would be the best example of the soup of tiny details you need to work with if you try and build your own RSS reader. As much as I believe that I have some good ideas for a digest-driven front-end to a feed reader, I don’t know if I have it in me to actually sit down for an extended period of time and build one, even if I were to leverage one of the popular RSS libraries out there, such as the ASP.NET RSS Toolkit.

I’d be curious to hear what other people think about it. Does anyone but me use a digest feed reader? Am I crazy for wanting to see a better one out there than Kinja? Will those Gawker guys ever update their damned blog? Only time will tell… but I’ll need to find a replacement soon, because those IE errors are driving me crazy.

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Posted in General, Rants, Web 2.0 |

Tags: feeds, kinja, rss, digest, readers, ie6, gawker