Robots Will Be Our Superiors

I’ve been using Pipes for a little bit now, and I have to say that I’m still impressed with what it can do.  For a while my results were less than ideal, but a little tweaking got things to the way they should be.  My biggest gaffe was to forget to set the block “all” fields to block “any”, which meant that I was still getting a large amount of unwanted posts that didn’t meet all of my filter’s criteria.

My only beef with Pipes so far is the updating process.  The news doesn’t trickle in like a normal RSS feed .  Instead, I get buckets of posts dumped on me periodically throughout the day.  Checking Reader has become pretty habitual for me, so it’s something that I’ve noticed happening.  I won’t get any Gawker-related posts for a few hours and then pow – 26 new posts.  Not a huge deal, but not ideal.  Oh well.

In my never-ending quest for RSS domination I came across yet another solution to keeping up to date on news in the form of RSSOwl.  RSSOwl is a standalone application that has a lot of things going for it.

The Good Stuff

1) You can easily import all of your feed information from another RSS reader.  In Google Reader one can export an OPML file which contains information about all of your currently subscribed feeds.  Load this file in RSSOwl, and you’ve got all of your blogs, including their folders.  No fuss, no muss.  Actually, there is one muss (?), but it has to do with Google.  When I thought I was exporting an .opml file I was actually creating a .xml file.  Since RSSOwl is looking for .opml files exclusively, it took me a while my exported feeds.  Once I changed the file extension all was well.  Google can import such files as well, so this convenience goes both ways.

2) You can FILTER any or all of your feeds in a way that I was using Pipes anyway.  Let’s say I wanted to subscribe to Food Bloggin, but I only wanted to see what my friend Chris was eating.  I could set up a filter to only include posts authored by Chris.  Pretty slick, and it negates the need for Pipes altogether.  (I will freely admit that using something as complex as Pipes as a simple RSS filter does not do its capabilities justice.)

3) Portability.  Having an application be “portable” is the new rock and roll these days, and the term gets thrown around almost as much as “cloud computing”.  The gist of it is that everything needed to run RSSOwl is self-contained in one directory, meaning you don’t really need to install the program.  Nothing is written to the registry, nothing is send to Windows.  This means that one can (as I do) run it off a USB drive on any computer.  Feeds anywhere!

4) RSSOwl is open source.  In case you couldn’t tell, I like that.

5) Tabbed browsing.  Tabs make everything better!

The Not So Good Stuff

1) For some reason when I open RSSOwl on a new computer, I need to reload my feeds.  Not quite sure why that is.  It kind of shoots the portability factor down a bit, eh?

2) There’s no way to mark something “as read” between readers.  If I read something in RSSOwl, it doesn not mark it read in Google Reader.  This is not a huge deal, and nobody’s fault in particular.  Being spoiled by IMAP, however, I can read something in Thunderbird and it will be read in Gmail, and vice versa.  Obviously there is no such standard written for blog postings, and I doubt there ever will be.

3) The logo is kind of devious.  Mozilla has a pretty slick logo in Firefox and Thunderbird, and the RSSOwl logo is a not-so-subtle attempt and trying to blend right into the Mozilla suite.  Whether that’s a tip of the hat or an attempt to catch the un-savvy into thinking they’re all part of the same project is unbeknownst to me.

The image below is the default, and the result of my opening RSSOwl on my laptop for the first time.

I remember reading about Pipes a long time ago, and gave it the same reaction as I recently did Google Wave… “that’s cool, but I’m not sure why I would use it.”  I really need to start going with the opposite of my gut feeling, because I inevitably end up being wrong about whatever it is I am dismissive of.  (Wave will probably end up being the Next Big Thing, just watch.)

Case in point: Pipes.  Yahoo uses all sorts of examples for filtering Wikipedia entries, searching for people’s biographies, blah blah blah – what I see it useful for is RSS feeds.

I believe I can safely say, without hyperbole, that I would shrivel up and die without Google Reader.  It’s my home page on my laptop, and I check it regularly throughout the day.  I not only have the blogs of all my friends, but all of the Cubs news, tech news, local news, etc. available in one place, sorted and aggregated for my convenience.

One of my most favoritist blogs is Lifehacker, which is part of a bigger group of blogs called the Gawker Media Group.  They do top-notch work with a consistent interface across all their blogs and great stories.  There are three other GMG blogs that I am interested in, but all of them produce WAY too many posts to keep up with.

Gizmodo – great blog, but WAY too much news on Apple and Apple products.  I’m done being actively anti-Apple, but that doesn’t mean that I care.  I don’t care about the iPhone, I don’t care what Steve Jobs coughed up this morning, and I don’t care about the fact that our Fearless Leader can’t use Macs in the White House (the horror!).  If only there was some way I could get rid of all of Apple-related posts but still get the rest of the news…

Kotaku – The best video game blog there is, but also the most prolific.  I have no beef with any particular content, but there’s just too much of it.  If only I could parse the news down to the platforms I own…

Io9 – This blog covers everything sci-fi, but I get my movie news from other feeds, and really only care about the book news and review, of which there aren’t too terribly many.  If only I could pick out those few book review posts and send them to my Google Reader…

But wait!  I can do all of those things, and in one place, no less!  Pipes lets you set up a slew of feeds in one graphical display, plop some filters on them and combine into one feed.  The process is fairly straightforward, and one look at a capture of my Gawker Media pipe makes it pretty self-explanatory.  The only hangupI had with the whole process was that simply putting in “http://gizmodo.com” was not enough to allow Pipes to filter it properly.  But adding “/index.xml”, which is the address of the actual RSS feed, allowed everything to work properly.

Click to enlarge

I need to give this a few days to see how well this all works out.  I have to say that I’m a fan of the interface.  Setting up the actual filters was fun, but getting them all to fit on one screen while having the little tubes not cross or be blocked was oddly satisfying.

What Yahoo did right was acknowledge that people use services that aren’t Yahoo based.  Once you create your Pipe, you’re supplied with the neverable Google Reader that adds an RSS feed to your Reader account.

I’m sure there are a million uses for Pipes that I’m not aware of or will ever use.  I have a lot of friends that are big in investing these days, and I bet Pipes would be able to update them on all sorts of things.  We’ll see how my blog-filtering experiment goes, though, and we’ll see what I can do from there.

I haven’t posted or done… anything for a while.  Why?  See my previous entry.

Speaking of lazy, here’s my latest comic!  (I actually took some new pictures for the next one, I promise.)

Click to enlarge.