Loading Profile...
An epiphany about aideRSS's terminology: "Great" means the blog is relatively crappy and you want to filter more aggressively
Ok. I feel pretty dumb. It finally dawned on me how to use aideRSS properly.
Originally, I just imported all my RSS feeds (in OPML format) into aiderss and it generates a single feed that has the best posts from all my feeds.
That's how I used aideRSS since it came out until today...
Today I realized why there's a text box for you to type in the URL at the front page, aideRSS is meant to be used as a feed scrubber!
You put in a feed, for example, lifehacker.com and then you pick your "choosiness" level. For example, if I only allow "Good" posts in, then that eliminates half the posts on lifehacker. If set to "Great" posts only, then I would only see 20% of the posts.
Once the RSS is piped through aideRSS, I can get back a filtered RSS feed, that I then put back into NetNewsWire.
And voila, I only see the more important posts from the really prolific sites like lifehacker.
Also, I realized that I've been using the "My Feeds" preferences completely wrong... I thought "Great" was supposed to mark a blog as my favorite -- thus adjusting its ranking to give it more boost. It means the exact opposite!! "Great" means this blog is relatively crappy, so you only want to allow the creme of the crop.
I don't know if other people ran into the same thing. There might be some UI design lessons in here.
Originally, I just imported all my RSS feeds (in OPML format) into aiderss and it generates a single feed that has the best posts from all my feeds.
That's how I used aideRSS since it came out until today...
Today I realized why there's a text box for you to type in the URL at the front page, aideRSS is meant to be used as a feed scrubber!
You put in a feed, for example, lifehacker.com and then you pick your "choosiness" level. For example, if I only allow "Good" posts in, then that eliminates half the posts on lifehacker. If set to "Great" posts only, then I would only see 20% of the posts.
Once the RSS is piped through aideRSS, I can get back a filtered RSS feed, that I then put back into NetNewsWire.
And voila, I only see the more important posts from the really prolific sites like lifehacker.
Also, I realized that I've been using the "My Feeds" preferences completely wrong... I thought "Great" was supposed to mark a blog as my favorite -- thus adjusting its ranking to give it more boost. It means the exact opposite!! "Great" means this blog is relatively crappy, so you only want to allow the creme of the crop.
I don't know if other people ran into the same thing. There might be some UI design lessons in here.
I’m amused
Follow this discussion to get notifications on your dashboard.
Create a customer community for your own organization
Plans starting at $19/month
-
Inappropriate?I think renaming the settings to "Great Posts Only" etc would make more sense.
-
Inappropriate?Icy, thanks a lot for the feedback, very helpful insights! Out of curiosity, what led to this realization? Was there a specific hint, or was it just a general: "oh, I get it, moment?"
We're working on a new information architecture / layout of AideRSS, so this is very timely. We'd love to get your feedback once we have something ready - ping me on (ilya at aiderss dot com) if you're interesting in doing some beta testing.
-
Inappropriate?Hi Ilya,
Yes, the hint was from seeing the specific percentage break down from any individual blog.
For example, "Good" yields 57%, "Great": 20%, "Best": 8%...
That's when the terminology finally clicked in.
The problem was that when I first came to aideRSS... I saw that main url text box, I put in an URL like slashdot.org, and it spit out some results and I thought: this is nice, every post now has a PostRank score, but I have so many RSS feeds, why would I want to enter them into aideRSS one by one?
So I quickly went off and look for a way to bulk import all my feeds through OPML import, and I sort of latched onto that, until yesterday.
That brings up the other point. aideRss is a service that becomes invisible. It's good for the customers, but also bad because they might not have enough chance to "get educated" about the system.
-
Inappropriate?Ah, yeah that makes sense. It also doesn't help that the 'tabs' for good / great / best are also not immediately obvious as buttons - something we'll address in the new layout.
You're also absolutely correct on the invisible service. At AideRSS, we're not trying to build a better feed reader, rather, we want to expose our service to the community as a whole. For some great examples of seamless integration of our data, take a look at our GoogleReader extension (gr.aiderss.com), Newsgator Online, or trawlr.com!
EMPLOYEE
