I’ve been using RSS readers for over 20 years. Most of that time has been spent using the excellent NetNewsWire application, but I’ve used others (including Google Reader, Fever˚, etc.).
After reading Terry Godier’s post on RSS readers being stuck in the email metaphor, I wanted to experiment with some ideas for a “non-email” metaphor for a feed reader interface. The most interesting and useful version of this that I’ve used was the “Hot” view from Shaun Inman’s Fever˚ application. What would it look like to integrate something like that into my NetNewsWire database?
Levine’s Law: Start with the demo.1 (if my dumb webcam self is in the way, you can just drag it if you want so see something that’s blocked by it…)
The main idea is to have an interface to control a set of weighted parameters that act as indicators of “interestingness” for feeds and items. These weights adjust an algorithm that calculates a Score for each item, and that Score is used to present and prioritize items in the reader interface.
This experimental mockup application was vibecoded with Google’s Antigravity and Claude Code. It’s an electron app. Which, yeah. Let’s not do that. But, as a quick way to prototype an idea? It worked well enough. I did burn through a week’s worth of tokens in both Antigravity and Claude Code…
RSS Feed Item Scoring
A screenshot of an interface to set weights for various attributes of RSS feed items.
Image by D'Arcy Norman
This is all basically riffing on the original Pagerank idea (pre-advertising-and-enshittification), and I think that having the weights of parameters used in the algorithm visible - and adjustable - could make this a much more useful approach.
The documentation of the Score algorithm weights is available (generated by Claude Code after it built the Electron app).
Anyway. A rough prototype of a rough idea of the start of maybe something useful?
Levine’s Law also dates back 20 years! Amazing. ↩︎