My idea is this: People on Tumblr are stuck there, because it's the only way to keep track of their news feed. If you have friends on Tumblr and want to keep track of them, it's the only way. Unfortunately, the news feed does not let you track anything that isn't on Tumblr. So at that point, you simply stop reading things that aren't on Tumblr.
However, there is another way to track people on Tumblr! There's something called RSS, which is used by old-timers like me. All you need is an RSS reader, such as Feedly, and then you add subscriptions to anything you like.
For instance! If I wanted to keep track of the Hiveswap tumblr:
http://hiveswapgame.tumblr.Then I simply go to the rss feed:com/
http://hiveswapgame.tumblr.And then there's the option to put it into Feedly! This isn't tech-geek level stuff, it's really simple syndication (RSS)!com/rss
RSS offers many advantages compared to Tumblr. You can subscribe to blogs that aren't on Tumblr. You can subscribe to webcomics. The world is ripe for the taking!
The Tumblr news feed also offers a few advantages:
- What the hell is RSS?
- The Tumblr news feed is easily accessible.
- Tumblr doesn't keep track of how much you've read, so there's no anxiety over unread counts
- Tumblr lets you keep track of tags, which as far as I know, have no associated RSS feed.
- I've already subscribed to a lot of Tumblrs and it's too much work to subscribe to each and every RSS feed.
- What the hell is RSS?
Does anyone have any suggestions? Which RSS reader would work best? How can I write the sales pitch? What sort of pitfalls might a person encounter when switching from Tumblr to RSS, and how might I solve them?
24 comments:
As I said over on Coyote's blog, I vastly prefer Feedly to any of the other readers I tried and experimented with when Google Reader crashed. In addition to being supported by /rss links, you can actually add content by going to their "add content" button and pasting in a URL. That seems like it would be very intuitive for people who are not familiar with RSS feeds. There's even a couple of Tumblr blogs I follow primarily that way, since I go on frequent Tumblr hiatuses (since I am not usually interested in wading through miles of fandom gifs to get to the text-based content I want) and would worry about missing them otherwise.
I didn't try many other readers besides Feedly and Google Reader, so I'm not sure which ones are best. Thanks for your input!
Admittedly
I don't subscribe to many tumblrs through RSS myself, because it would
kind of flood my reader junk. I wonder if in the sales pitch I would
need to show people how to put Tumblr stuff in a separate folder.
Also I suppose I can't use RSS to track when other people reblog my stuff. Not sure there's any way around that one...
Another issue I just thought of is that lots of people use the Tumblr Savior add-on. I don't use it myself so I don't know exactly what it does. Is there a way to replicate it for RSS?
Holy shit, there's a way to transfer all subscriptions from Tumblr to RSS all at once! You need to go to http://www.tumblr.com/following.opml and download the file. Then in Feedly's "organize" window, you can import opml files.
I agree on Feedly being generally the best... with the caveat that its iOS app has been really buggy, so I use Newsify to access Feedly from my iPad instead. I like Newsify's design better. Feedly is good when I'm on my PC or phone though.
Both Feedly and Newsify allow you to search for a feed by title of the blog instead of just a specific URL, too. Tumblr blogs do show up when you do that, at least most of the time.
Before I started a Tumblr blog, I subscribed to the blogs I was interested in via RSS (I'm currently using g2reader as my reader). I get the sense that RSS readers are old school these days and that it might be a tough sell getting people to start using one if they are not already doing so.
There are other aspects of Tumblr that an RSS reader doesn't reproduce, including the ability to receive asks, messages and submissions, see notifications when someone mentions you in a post, and so on.
Honestly, I hate Tumblr as much as anyone here, but as long as so many aces are active on Tumblr, then having my blog there makes sense for me because of the ease of reading everything in one place, being able to reblog interesting content, and use Tumblr's community features.
I use Bloglovin and like it (although the name annoys me :P); I tried Feedly briefly when I was first looking for a reader, but didn't like it (can't remember why). Bloglovin has the same options of entering a blog/Tumblr's URL in the app in order to follow it, or searching by title. I don't know that you can add directly from the RSS feed, though.
It took me a little while to make the connection that I could follow Tumblr blogs through Bloglovin as well, but I'm glad I finally did because having everything in one place is so much simpler.
testing
I tried The Old Reader for some time and found I disliked it, and I know I dabbled with Newsblur a little before I gave in to my PI's enthusiasm and switched to Feedly. It really is the best thing I've found.
The ones I do subscribe to are the ones where people don't do the gifs and random reblogs and things so much, honestly. Currently I think the only active one is aceadmiral.
Page hits for people reblogging? Talk about pingbacks in that bit.
I don't understand re: pingbacks.
I really love NetNewsWire! It's for Macs and similar to Google Reader/The Old Reader. I tried Feedly but didn't like it as much.
Yeah, there are a lot of advantages to the tumblr news feed, and I may not convince people to drop it entirely. But it would be nice if I could convince them to use an RSS feed at least some of the time, so that they can read blogs that aren't on tumblr.
I think being mac exclusive might make it a poor choice for switching people from Tumblr. Although the built-in browser sounds neat.
Looks like g2reader is missing an iOS app. Also it looks kind of old-school. I'm not sure it would appeal to tumblr users.
Bloglovin looks worth checking out. I'm used to reading my rss in the condensed title-only style, which is very different from Tumblr's expanded style. Feedly also has some expanded style options but they're not particularly pretty. Maybe Bloglovin offers a better expanded style.
I will check out newsify
I don't use Tumblr Savior, but as far as I can tell it has a blacklist function (blocks posts that contains a certain word in the post or the tags) and a whitelist function (blocks posts that contains x, unless it also contains y).
I use XKit instead, another extension, which has both these functions and also makes Tumblr about 10000 times more useable as well as giving you many more options and settings. Perhaps you may want to replicate parts of XKit as well? From what I've seen, it seems to be more popular than Tumblr Savior now but I haven't found any statistics. The closest I've gotten is XKit's 2013 survey where it was explicitly stated "The most popular non-XKit extension: Tumblr Savior" but this doesn't say outright whether XKit is more popular or Tumblr Savior is... There was a comment on fixing problems people had with XKit since then (mostly the blacklist), so I don't know.
I did a bit more digging around, and it seems that a lot of people who stuck with Tumblr Savior did so just because they already had it and knew how to use it, rather than because they had tried both and preferred one.
I don't have a solution for replicating it in RSS, however, sorry about that. I'm wondering if just replicating it is enough though, as I know the XKit guy frequently updates, fixes, and introduces new features to XKit.
What I like about it is that it has an option to star posts, so I can find them easier later. It corresponds to Feedly's "save for later" feature, but I think it's way more intuitive to present it that way, given that it's the same as gmail, so I think new users will have an easier time figuring that out. I think Feedly's expanded-view icons are more confusing in general, so they probably need a detailed explanation.
So I just tried some of things mentioned here. NetNewsWire looks really nifty, but I don't have a Mac, so that wasn't an option (when my computer dies - and it probably will very soon - I might consider a Mac). Of the other options, I think I like Feedly best. It has the options to subscribe to blogs, vlogs and tumblrs and to save individual posts regardless of whether you're following that blog. As I mentioned on my Tumblr, I'm not just looking for a news feed, but also for something that has some more advanced organizing and archiving functions. Feedly seems to be the most intuitive and has the most options in that regard.
What I noticed when trying out the different websites is that all have the option to import OPML files. Perhaps it's an idea to have an OPML file available for download with a small collection of active ace blogs, Tumblrs and video channels. Like a "start-up packet" for people wanting to explore the blogging/vlogging communities, but who don't necessarily know where to start. That way, people can choose their own preferred RSS reader, and have a collection of blogs that can serve as a basis for their ace news feed.
That's a cool idea about the start-up packet. I'd probably need to crowdsource it though.
Looking around, I found there's an addon called SPOI Filter (for Chrome or Firefox) which has a blacklist function for feedly. If anyone here tries it out, I would appreciate hearing how it goes.
Sorry, I was definitely not spelling my thoughts out thoroughly last night. What I meant is that if you want to get a feel for how your post is being responded to, WP's page hit stats are pretty good for that. If you want to see responses made to your post that are hosted elsewhere, pingbacks are usually pretty good for notifying you that someone is linking to your work.
FWIW, I use my feedly in the same way as I use my tumblr feed--by expanding it to read the whole posts all at once. If I'm not interested, I just scroll quickly through.
Yeah, it's definitely old school even among RSS readers. I like it because it gets me the posts in my feeds without a lot getting in the way :p When I was looking for a replacement for Google Reader, Feedly seemed like it had more features than I needed. So, yeah... I'm really old school, LOL.
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