RSS is amazing. It’s the natural progression of information, but it won’t be the end of that path. Until that evolution comes though (or has it?) I’m living the high life using Google Reader with my tweaks.

First, if a feed doesn’t fit my needs, I make it do so. With io9, a gawker sci-fi geek blog, it includes spoiler posts - majorly uncool. I hate spoilers in any form. I rarely watch the peek into next week’s episode of any show I’m watching, even that is too much for me. So what do I do? First I sent them an email suggesting that they offer a feed sans spoiler posts. Then I decide to take the initiative and I use Yahoo Pipes to easily filter the feed with any post which contains the word “spoiler” in its title. This same concept can be done of course with any feed that contains posts you never read.

Secondly, one thing Google Reader does poorly is implement tags. They treat them more as folders in their display rather than tagging. If they want to fix their tags they need to completely overhaul how they are presented, entered and handled. Until they do, it feels more like a non-limited folder system where things can exist in multiple folders. That being said, I’ve today created a new “tag” (folder) called “_Top.” The _ (called an underscore) is used to put the tag at the top of the listing. And this tag is used to mark feeds which I discover myself reading much more frequently than skimming. This way, when I log into Reader and have a large collection of feeds to read, the cream is at the… top.

Thirdly, I implemented a page-to-rss app for Paul Graham’s essay page. He has a link to such a feed maintained by some individual, but since I would rather put my data in the hands of corporations I worked it through a handful of sites to provide a clean and perfect RSS feed from his page.

Fourthly, I’ve begun actively seeking out utility feeds. Things like weather reports, news alerts, etc. The more I can funnel into this channel for information, the better. In addition I am able to rss things like my calendar and reminders (like my instapaper feed.)

Going back to the first example, I need to spin off and discuss Yahoo Pipes some. I think this is a tool which really isn’t getting a fair shake. It’s an easy to comprehend tool to create complex data processing applications, with a heavy emphasis on RSS feeds since they are, by design, best used for this sort of thing.

My day job is actually implementing a solution through Yahoo Pipes. We have software which has a collection of RSS feeds but inexplicably does not offer a unified feed, and so very easily we are able to create a unified feed through Yahoo Pipes. Sure, we could write our own solution, but it would take us 30 minutes of time, where this one will take us 60 seconds.