Tuesday, November 15, 2011

don't break the only way to do something

It is impossible to stay up-to-date with all of the blogs and news sites I read.  For infrequently-updated sites with a high percentage of good stuff, RSS solves the problem.  For frequently-updated sites with a lower percentage, it does not.  I don't want to sift through hundreds or thousands of articles manually each day.

Up until a few weeks ago, I knew of exactly one solution to this problem: "sort by magic" in Google Reader, which sorted the RSS entries in my feed by, well, magic.  Unfortunately, Google's much-maligned Reader update has killed the magic.  The "sort by magic" option is still there, but they should probably change its name to "sort by angry illiterate moose".  I used to see a nice mixture of posts from all of my followed sites, where posts from infrequently-updated sites usually showed up near the top, along with only the "best" posts from frequently-updated sites.  (I don't know what "best" means, but it seemed to do just fine.)  Now, I just see hundreds of posts from TechCrunch.  This is not magic.

So, now I have zero solutions to this problem.  I can no longer follow blogs like Marginal Revolution with several posts per day.  TechCrunch is out of the question.

Any suggestions?