fraidycat seems like a really cool way to follow blogs and other websites. It’s kind of just bookmarks that check the sites for recent updates. It seems like it solves a couple of problems:
- Your feed is not presented to you as another inbox that you have to get through
- You read posts on the author’s site
There are a few media outlets I follow — like Streetsblog — that publish a lot and that tends to fill up my feed, often with articles many of which I end up skipping. fraidycat groups all the updates under the domain and gives you a list of the most recent headlines, which seems perfect for handling outlets like Streetsblog. In addition to lumping all updates from a single domain to…
fraidycat seems like a really cool way to follow blogs and other websites. It’s kind of just bookmarks that check the sites for recent updates. It seems like it solves a couple of problems:
- Your feed is not presented to you as another inbox that you have to get through
- You read posts on the author’s site
There are a few media outlets I follow — like Streetsblog — that publish a lot and that tends to fill up my feed, often with articles many of which I end up skipping. fraidycat groups all the updates under the domain and gives you a list of the most recent headlines, which seems perfect for handling outlets like Streetsblog. In addition to lumping all updates from a single domain together, it also lets you group things by how often you want to check them (be careful about putting everything in “real-time” because it looks like that does a lot of polling). So you can even move some of your news outlets into a bucket like “Sometimes” or “Occasionally” so that you look at them less frequently.
And I do love that I still get to go the websites and read the articles there. This means I still get to see things like CodePen embeds, or fancy art direction.
I think there are two possible downsides…
First, I’m not sure if fraidycat is still being maintained. Looking at the fraidycat GitHub project it hasn’t received many updates in a few years other than some fixes for scraping Instagram, and Twitter, and the like. I can see some chatter about fraidycat 2 in some of the issues, but nothing that looks like meaningful movement.
Second, although fraidycat does style visited links so that you can tell which articles you’ve already read, it does not appear to hide sites for which you have no unread articles. So sites are presented to you in each tab based on the most recently published article, regardless of whether or not you’ve read that article. So probably not a great tool if you’re a completionist in terms of the feeds you follow.
Still, I think this is a pretty cool idea for how to manage follows instead of the usual inbox approach.
Found via Xanthe Tynehorn on People & Blogs.