Reading, Humanized

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As soon as I heard about the concept of Web syndication, I wanted to take advantage of it. Reading on the web would be so much more convenient: I could just go to one place to find the information I wanted, instead of visiting a bunch of different blogs every day to see if they had anything new.

The problem, as I soon discovered, was the aggregators.

An aggregator is just a program that grabs syndication feeds from the websites you read and shows you what’s new on them. It sounds like a simple concept, but for some reason all the ones I found were way too complicated for me. Most of them were desktop programs I had to download and install, and the interfaces they gave me were inevitably filled with panes, heirarchical trees, scroll bars, and what have you. They had lots of modes. They made me stop and think about navigation every time I looked at the title of a post and every time I finished reading one.

But I just wanted to know what was new on my blogs, and those were easy to read. It just involved scrolling down a page and looking at entries; I didn’t have to navigate through heirarchical trees or switch between panes or any of the other things that these aggregators were making me do.

Why couldn’t reading an aggregator be as simple as reading a blog?

So as a little side project, we decided to try making our own aggregator based on that idea. It’s a work in progress, certainly, but we like what we’ve come up with so far. In fact, we’re inclined to think it’s even easier than reading a blog, because of a nifty feature we implemented. We call it Humanized History, and we’re hoping that you don’t even notice what it is, because that’s sort of its point: to let you spend more time reading, and less time thinking about navigation.

So feel free to take a look and let us know what you think.