9 Tips For Running More Productive Meetings…

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I would like to have tags on feeds, not just on posts. So that I can tag the 43folders feed with “mac” and “productivity” and “GTD” etc. And make smart folders that will put 43folders in the same “mac” folder as ThinkSecret and Daring Fireball. And in the same “GTD” smart folder as David Allen’s blog etc.

The RSS app MacNews Pro has this now, and others should follow.

I also would like to have the feeds of all my friends connected to their adress book entry. Let’s say I were a close friend of Merlin: I would add him in my Mac OS X Adress book, and add his sites in there as well. Then I would add the corresponding feeds to his sites in another column.

Then I could add his Flickr page - and the feed to that. The Del.icio.us page and it’s feed. And so on.

The Adress book should then display special page for me in Safari or the browser of choice, and show all new posts, pics, bookmarks etc. under his name.

This would keep the data and the person together, making it easier to manage.

I would like to have the news reader skip to the next unread item if I have triggered the current item to open in a new browser window. Some of the full content feeds require 5 or more taps on the space bar to move on to the next item.

My initial reaction to the dinosaurs is I’ll take the features suggested, but really, I don’t want it popping up at me with any frequency. So, I want an off button. The stuff I want to read I keep up at the top, and the rest can just smolder and die unread down below, in the lazy afternoon reading folder. I’ll run the dino stuff when it pleases me.

I like having my feeds in a separate app - that way I can turn it off when I’m trying to avoid the distraction. I totally agree with Paul about the notification options though - that little ‘ding’ is annoying and unneccessary for most feeds, but for a select few it could be useful. At the moment I’m using Newsfire (1.2 v.45), which is pretty and easy to use, but hardly has any features - this gets to be tiring when you want to optimise your feeds. Ah well. I like your ideas, Merlin, and I think that developing the features of rss apps is the way forward - and quickly please!

“What in this world could possibly seem more important before it happens, but could matter less once it’s passed?”

Anything that is marketed? And Death.

Speaking of deliveries, I have found the Shipment Tracker widget (Yahoo! Widget Engine) invaluable lately. Very easy to manage.

I agree with everything above and have wished for the same features myself. And I’ve used the Dinosaurs window and thought it could be better. It would be neat, too, if RSS itself had the notion of expiration so that FedEx feed could tell the reader it would no longer be valid in a week or two.

1. Not for Mac, but SharpReader has this.

2. Dunno.

My gripe is lack of intelligent filtering: http://www.kickflop.net/blog/?p=84

I guess I should know better than to use ‘1.’ and ‘2.’ to enumerate items above ;)

Both of those are very nifty ideas. In the meantime, you could get some of the effect by making 2 folders in your RSS reader:

1) Temporary, for Fedex or similar feeds. Delete whenever there’s no activity for a week or so. 2) On Trial, for things you’re not sure if you want to keep. If nothing interesting pops up in your On Trial feeds for a month or two, delete them.

Shouldn’t the dinosaur ‘popup window’ actually be an RSS feed?

I use Bronwyn’s method. My trial group is called “Dean Wormer” because they’re on double secret probation. And if it all gets too big, I just bin the lot and start again.

Yeah, totally, I actually wrote about something similar. But part of the problem is all that manual labor; if I have a clear sense of how long I’ll need something (or how long I want to “try it on”), it would be useful to enter the info right up front and then not have to worry about maintaining it.

Am I the only one who hates launching a separate program to read RSS? I’d love for a good RSS Firefox extension that has the power of a desktop FeedDemon without having to manage a separate app

Thanks, Merlin — great ideas! I agree whole-heartedly. (You can see some of these and similar features in the latest beta of FeedDemon [also from NewsGator]. Feed management is very much on mine and everybody’s radar.)

I want to see per-feed notification options. Not all feeds are created equal. Some feeds – like “what new free stuff in my neighborhood has been posted on Craigslist?”, would deserve an interruption (Growl notification, annoying ring, etc.)

Most other feeds, not so much.

iTunes has a great little feature that I accidentally discovered. It seems that it automatically stops downloading Podcasts once it notices that you haven’t been listening to a episodes of a particular podcast. You can go back in and enable it or delete it.

Nice. Maybe “structured RSS” could help with these problems the way it has been proposed for blogging (i.e. RSS feeds tagged “listings” or “reviews” or “rantings” or, on a different level, the kind source the feed is coming from). This would also help with some of the problems I was thinking about here (some feeds should include comments, like this one!!!), among others.

[…] Random tidbit. I’ve followed Merlin’s dangerous precedent, and nuked nearly everything I have. Unlike Merlin, I didn’t delete everything. I’ve left only those places I know I enjoy reading at least once a week. Everything else is gone. I did, however, backup my subscriptions as an OPML file. I’ll drop that into my personal Subversion repo, svn rm and then forget about it. If I really, really need it I can dig. But I’m sure I won’t. If you care at all, you can see my subscriptions on my public Bloglines profile. In addition to what you see I have one Trial folder, and one folder to ensure my own feeds come out right. […]

[…] A thought I had (after reading 43 Folders’ suggestion for an aggregator having a feed expiration setting) - what about engagement letters that expire? […]

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