My Kinja Digest, and HNBP’s Kinja Card.

The new Kinja went completely under my radar when it relaunched, partly because I was in the Philippines at the time, but mostly because all my feedreading had been on Bloglines.

My problem with Bloglines, however, (and this is a problem with me, not with Bloglines) was that I had 252 feeds, (it was over 300 at one point before I did some pruning) and the inbox-like “unread messages” interface became intimidating if I left anything unread for more than a few hours. Treating each new weblog entry from each feed as an individual item to be read became an overwhelming exercise in trying to keep up with a never-ending flow of content, and clicking “Mark All As Read” always left me with a gnawing feeling of having missed something.

I couldn’t keep going like that, waking up with hundreds of unread feeds waiting for me every morning, and then again every evening after work. (Not that and have a life too, anyway.) If feeds are a river, I was drowning in a flood. I had to stop being anxious about missing dozens of unread posts per hour. To badly mangle the river metaphor, you can’t drink a river with a cup; you’re supposed to sit on the riverbank and peacefully watch the current flow — and not try to catch sight of every single boat, beaver, or twig that floats by.

So I’ve switched back to Kinja for feed reading. Tagging has been added, and my old concerns with post-strafing and long pauses between updates seem to have been addressed. (On the down side, batch-editing of subscriptions seems to have been removed as a feature, which makes tagging, deleting, and editing multiple digest links rather tedious, and the AJAX interface is something I could do without.) I can go to my digest and not be pressured by an insanely high “unread posts” count, and now I regard my links as a view that I can occasionally admire, rather than a list of tasks that need to be done.