RSS Feeds
organise
AideRSS Add-On Filters Feeds by Popularity in Google Reader
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 1:09 AM on July 12, 2008
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): AideRSS, an RSS feed popularity filter that Adam had a few bones to pick with, has released a free Firefox extension that integrates its popularity rankings into Google Reader. AideRSS says it uses the number of comments, Google backlinks, bookmarks on social sites like Digg, reddit, and del.icio.us, and more data to determine a PostRank, which it plugs next to each feed item and offers as a drop-down filter. While it's obviously going to bias your reading against fresher posts that haven't had time to make their mark, it might be helpful to anyone trying to cut down on RSS clutter. For their next version, let's hope for an options dialogue to remove that PostRank number from every single post, as the filtering bar may be more useful to most users. AideRSS is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
Tags: aiderss | extensions | feeds | firefox | organise | rss
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Ortzinator
Posted 3:22 AM 12/7/08
It shows all Lifehacker items as 10. :P
Ortzinator
mrshl
Posted 4:46 AM 12/7/08
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader's best feature: its speed. It's painfully slow. It would take something awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR performance.
Let me know when they fix that whole speed thing, and I'll try it out again.
mrshl
stuffandco
Posted 5:56 AM 12/7/08
It would be really great if it had a "sort by rating" option for the articles.
stuffandco
MarkONeill
Posted 7:50 PM 12/7/08
@mrshl: I agree. I installed it but eventually had to uninstall it because it slowed Google Reader to a snail's pace. It was a shame because I really liked it and I wrote a glowing review about it. But I rely on Google Reader to do my job so when AideRSS slowed GR to a grinding halt, it had to go.
MarkONeill
Prolific Programmer
Posted 5:46 AM 14/7/08
What it ought to do is present feeds in order of popularity of the SITE. If the entry's URL is, say, this entry -- it ought to order it according to number of links to lifehacker.
Prolific Programmer
aiderss
Posted 11:24 PM 15/7/08
Some updates for the comments above:
@Ortzinator - Yep, we're aware of it and it's in the process of being fixed.
@mrshl - We're heard this from a few folks. We're continuing to make things as efficient and fast as possible, but there are a lot of factors we can't control, so one feature we're adding soon will be an on/off toggle to give people the option of when to run PostRank or not.
@stuffandco - We've had this request before, and we like the idea, but unfortunately given how Google Reader presents content, we can't offer a sort feature. If things change in the future we'll definitely look at it again.
@Prolific Programmer - Unfortunately, can't do this one in Google Reader, either, though it's another cool one we've had requested and would love to include. Bottom line, though, would just require too much hacking, which wouldn't be good for the rest of the system.
aiderss
imjimmurphy
Posted 11:40 PM 12/7/08
@Ortzinator - we're looking into the all 10s issue. We really like LifeHacker and use the feed a lot for testing - probably introduced some bad data prior to our postrank.com launch. We're on it.
@mrshl, @MarkONeill I had this same problem on on my laptops - it was from really high CPU usage by the firefox process. For some reason some systems exhibit this when others don't - does this sound liek what you're seeing? I think It has to do with how we're mashing with the DOM but we're still figuring this out. Any clues are appreciated.
imjimmurphy