RSS feed reader...

Ok, ok, I know, I'm supposed to be working... but I just had to share...

I've been using RSS feeds to look really smart for awhile now. Most journals have RSS feeds of their tables of contents which update with all the new articles. Sooo... to "stay on top of the literature" I've been using the RSS feeds of the most relevant journals in my field (and the biggies... Science and Nature with their associated "news-y" segments) in combination with saved searches in Safari. This actually works fine, except that the search criterion are a bit primitive and getting logical statements in there is somewhere between a pain and impossible (I recall trying at some point... but I gave up). The other issue is that to check the feeds I end up opening my web browser and well, this snapshot of my bookmarks bar might give you a hint as to where that often leads...



uh-huh... so while in principle this saves me time and makes me look really on the ball, I end up reading your blogs or comics or... you get the point. Also note that the total unread feeds for all the journals I'd like to survey is a whopping 4821. Searching or filtering these with relevant terms is essential to this process being of any help at all.

Also, many dedicated feed readers out there have nice features that Safari does not (because it's primary purpose is to be a web browser... ) so I had looked and looked for a good *free* feed reader some time ago and basically hit the wall when none of the free version had the ability to search.

Until today my friends. Today I stumbled upon the fact that NetNewsWire (for Mac) is now free (the full version, not some "lite" version like before), and it can do all I want it to do.

Now my feeds are in there, organized and filtering out what I really need to know. It's fantastic. And I won't have to open a browser, so as long as I leave the blogs, and comics, and everything else distracting out of there, we are looking at a new era of productivity.

Yipee! :)