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I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that.

Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.

In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.

If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.

Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.

RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.

[1] - http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html



Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs. I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use rss.


> and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting

check out http://www.readability.com/addons




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