Aehso’s Output

I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a while back for the various reasons already expounded by many ex-Blogliners. That said, Google Reader still isn’t perfect for me, and I sometimes think about switching back. Two things are bugging me:

• I have (many) feeds organized in various hierarchical folders and I routinely switch between the Expanded and List View during each session, depending on how feed items are unread. When doing a “bulk-catch-up” of all the items from several feeds in a folder I find it incredibly difficult to quickly scan over the chronologically ordered list of items. Does anybody else find context switching from feed to feed while scanning the item titles mentally taxing? I’d love an option to sort controls in the list table header, then I could do “”Sort by feed, then chronologically” and relax my brain a little. I know can get individual lists by jumping from feed to feed but I want to have my cake (one big flat list) AND eat it (scan item titles without incessant key pressing/clicking).
• The List View paging implementation is a bit slow isn’t it? Sometimes I want to skip over a whole bunch of items but I get stuck waiting a few seconds for the “Loading the next 20 items…” AJAX request to be completed. How about prefetching the next 20-40? Meanwhile my list scrollbar is always visually the the wrong size and in the wrong location. Invariably, I am not at the end of a short list as it usually indicates. In fact, I generally do not know if I have scanned over the complete set of entries without checking to see if it trying to “Load the next 20 items…” again. And what is it doing pinging all of those feed URLs while loading? I would have thought the great Google “sharks with frickin’ laser beams” back end could easily cache and supply the feed entry titles, and descriptions, maybe sending off AJAX requests to the original feed whenever I move my mouse over/near a list entry (if it needs to get enclosures etc.)

Anyhoo, rant over, if anyone has any tips, I’d be more than appreciative…

Interesting post by Alex Barnett that highlights how interesting ideas can sometimes be just stumbled upon.  When asking for a “outline of your professional career”, the listener heard “OPML sketch of who I am and how I got here”.  Well, OPML is the Outline Processor Markup Language so it should in theory be possible. 

4th dimension-oriented OPML files, hmmm…

Yesterday, I got an invite from Megite to play around with their new RSS news aggregator. It is very similar in function to memeorandum but they do have one feature I was curious about. When invited, they can generate a personalized page using any OPML file you supply as the “guide”. Check out my personal page, generated for an OPML file that I quickly exported from my Bloglines account.

Of course they need some feedback on their clustering algorithms but the concept is the all important thing. Obvious feedback: load the OPML from a URL I specify in my account settings (they don’t have accounts yet but you know where I’m going here) rather than asking me to manually upload it to them. Then they could update the page root “guide” whenever they wanted (I’m sure they’ve heard that request before).

Less obvious feedback: create a back end that can mash up multiple structured OPML files. With some smart algorithms they might then magically end up with a very smart feed /information grazer.

The web will be truly rocked if services like these start knitting search together with disparate structured OPML files….