Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

In the popular “Phenomenon X Sucks” series I present: My Feed Reader Isn't What It Should Be. I like the concept of newsfeeds — that I am automatically notified when a website (or more likely weblog) is updated. The interface and integration with my browser is kind of clunky though. This is funny since the feed reader is actually integrated into the browser I use.

The reader is a part of the e-mail client, which I have been content with until I got thinking tonight. Whenever a new item is picked up by the feed reader it is archived in a folder with the rest of the items from that website. This sucks because when Vlog 2.1 is updated I have a lot of scrolling to do. I used to think that newsfeeds fitted best into the e-mail paradigm (opposed to the bookmark paradigm Firefox has gone with). But really a combination of both would be the optimal for me.

What I would like is a sidebar in my browser — and it should be a part of my browser and not a stand-alone program — like the one in this entry (I have just added some random items from my feed reader). I already have sidebars for e-mail, bookmarks, recent downloads, chat and a handful other things by default, so how hard can it be to add one for newsfeeds?

This sidebar would be a constant flow of the most recently recieved items, let's say the last 50 because I'm not going to be watching the list constantly. It would be my own personal, customizable window into the blogosphere (or the blue-cow-sphere as we say in Danish). The sidebar would simply show the title and the excerpt of each item with a link to visit to full story/blog post/video entry. There should be a small note saying which website the item is from too.

I would still have my regular feed archives because they're nice for searching, but I would prefer to use this blogosphere-window as my main feed reader. The concept of only showing new items in the archived folder for the website is stupid, because it is by default it is irrelevant which feed the item came from — I added the feed to the reader so I'm interested in all entries. Of course some people use feeds differently and have their feed reader collect items from a huge list of websites. This would be handled by being able to mark some feeds as favourites, and only favourites would show up in The Window of the Blue Cow.

And the icons next to the items? The reader supports enclosures so it can tell me what kind of content I'll be looking at (images, video, audio, porn). More on that later.