Visiting Websites

I love my RSS reader and the mountain of feeds it lets me read/skim on a daily basis. But some recent discussion gave me pause on how I use RSS, and made me reflect on whether it strips something fundamental from the web: visiting cool websites.

Evan wrote about this in November:

I think RSS is great, but I sometimes feel like it’s at odds with one of my favorite things about the web. For one thing, I see less of my friends’ cool websites. A lot of the websites in my feed reader are really nice to look at. Some of their owners do periodic redesigns which are fun to see. I feel like I’m missing out a little on these lovely personal websites because I nearly always interact with them through my feed reader, which flattens all of the personality into a minimal, legible view.

Greg picked up this idea yesterday:

this seemed like a crazy idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. I read 99% of the blogs I follow in my favourite app Matter. Which is great in that it boils websites down to the basic content and makes it easier to read. However, it removes all personality and expression from personal websites.

As an aside, I’d argue that the prevalence of “mobile” reading experiences also do a lot to strip the personality out of websites too, not just RSS or Read-It-Later services. It’s hard to be whimsical when you’re just a single screen-wide column of text. Maybe that’s just me?

Habib also wrote on this topic, and how he uses a feature in Reeder to get around this problem:

As much as I enjoy the Reeder reading experience within the app, I enjoy reading the content even more on the publisher’s website or blog. Thankfully, Reeder makes this process easy; once I hit the title of the post from the list it launches the content, and a simple swipe right to left launches the content on the publisher’s site using the In-app safari browser. Depending on the article — if long-form posts — I can tap on the article title link to launch the content in the default mobile Safari browser, bypassing the need to swipe right to left.

For myself, I know I’m guilty of just chucking a site into Inoreader and forgetting about visiting again unless I need to find something so deep in the archives that I can’t get it through RSS any more. I’d like to change that behaviour over time. I remember when we would “make the rounds” to the sites on our blogrolls or in our webrings. In part this was because there were just a lot less sites to follow/visit in those days, and also in part it was because you had to go to the site to leave a comment or similar to give your thoughts to the author. You could write a post on your own site but there was no guarantee they would ever see it.

Regardless of why you had to visit, you did, and it meant you’d see all the (frequent) redesigns, the new widgets and experiments, the new links in the sidebar you could explore after your visit was concluded.

I feel the nostalgia is pulling me away from the point I was trying to get to, so let’s try to get back on track!

I want to change this behaviour of only viewing sites through the lens of a feed reader (or similar). I want to visit sites more routinely when they are updated. As Evan put it:

I wonder what the alternative looks like. A tool that helps you remember the sites you like to visit so that you can browse them at your leisure, but that doesn’t create a commitment to read—or at least look at—absolutely everything that is published on all of those sites.

I don’t know what it was, but this dragged FraidyCat to the surface of my memory. FraidyCat is an alternative take on following websites, created by Kicks Condor. It’s exactly what Evan describes: It keeps track of websites you want to follow, lets you see when they were last updated, but crucially for this purpose links to the website instead of loading the feed content. If you want to read the post then you have to click through. There are no notifications to make you read everything to clear a badge, and you can organise sites by how important they are to you.

I’ll admit that I never quite managed to “get” FraidyCat when I tried it out a few years back, but I’m going to give it another, more concerted try. I need to figure out my organisation structure and import some sites into it. It still might not stick. But if it gets me visiting websites again, and not only reading their feeds, then it will have been a worthwhile exercise.