Why popurls is the perfect aggregator
Online feed aggregators such as Google Reader and Bloglines are great for collecting timely articles from your favorite blogs and news sources. Every news site has an RSS feed attached to it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea to stick the feed directly into your reader.
The problem is volume. Blogs often update only a handful of times per day. The most active blog I subscribe to, the mental_floss blog, updates just nine times per day, on average. What happens when you have a feed from a site like Digg or reddit, which might cycle through dozens of front-page stories throughout the course of a day?
This is where popurls shines.
Instead of chronologically reading through these stories—which you’re not likely to do, anyway—you get an instant snapshot of many sources from across the Web. popurls is the brainchild of self-proclaimed “web maverick” Thomas Marban.
In comparison
Note that I’m not attempting to compare popurls to the aforementioned feed readers; they have their place for reading leisurely-updated blogs. Instead, popurls is more comparable to Web “portals” such as Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes.
It’s pretty
Because there are a limited number of feeds and categories available, Thomas was able to create images for the titles of feeds—typeset in Arial Rounded MT Bold. This is a nice touch in era of the Web where the universal adaptation of embedded fonts is still a far-off dream.
popurls also uses white space very effectively. There’s a lot of information here, but it never appears crowded or overflowing.
Most importantly, there is only one advertisement on the whole page. One! If you’re using a device with a smaller screen, such as a MacBook, this ad is actually “below the fold” and you might never even see it.
It has just the right amount of customization
I’m a hacker by nature, but there are some things I would rather not waste my time tweaking.
popurls lets me do what I want, and keeps out the stuff about which I could care less. I can reorder content blocks, and turn off media feeds (Flickr et al.). I can toggle the visibility of “popular today” or “recommended” feeds. I can set the color scheme to light-on-dark to give my weary eyes a rest.
I don’t want fancy widgets. I don’t need another place to access my e-mail inbox, my calendar, my weather report, and my sports scores. I don’t need themes when the user interface already approaches perfection. popurls doesn’t give me any of these features, and for that I am grateful.
You see, the thing I dislike about portal sites is that everything is user-generated. Not only is the content aggregated from user-submitted and user-created news stories, but in order to get the site in working order, the user himself must go about organizing feeds, finding relevant topics, picking color schemes, etc.
I don’t want full control over every nook and cranny at the sacrifice of speed and clean design. Instead, I want a talented Web developer to make the right decisions for me. In this case, I’m relying on Thomas to pick the most popular content feeds and deliver them in a nice layout.
I still need a little control, but these settings are called preferences for a reason. popurls seems to have struck the proper balance.
The customization controls are kept separate
You’ll also notice that popurls lacks many cumbersome user interface elements that plague the layouts of other portals. Instead of mixing content with user preferences, popurls places all the customization options in four clearly-labeled menus at the top-right.
Want white-on-black, or a larger font? Design is the place. Want to reorder your feeds? Hit up the View menu.
Design like this keeps the layout neat, and it prevents you from hunting all over the site to change an infrequently-used setting.
Miscellany
popurls gets brownie points on a few other fronts.
It has a suite of other useful sites
Check out the complete list of sites on the popurls network.
There’s popshuffle, the Web equivalent of channel surfing on your television. popurls.tv satisfies your content visualization needs. Also, the iPhone edition is just fantastic. There are even sites optimized for your Blackberry, PS2, PSP, and Wii.
No account required
popurls doesn’t have a proprietary account management system. You have to be authenticated through one of several other logins, one of which you’re bound to have already. At the current time, the supported login credentials are: OpenID, Google Accounts, Windows Live ID, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL AIM, Technorati, Flickr, and Blogger.
Conclusion
Work popurls into your daily Web reading habits. You won’t be disappointed. It frees you to spend more time reading articles and spotting trends percolating through the Web.
I leave you with an inspirational quote hidden in the source code of the popurls main page:
__ __ ( \,/ ) \_ | _/ IN THE FUTURE EVERY URL WILL BE POPULAR FOR 1.5 SECONDS (_/ \_) - thomas and the wise butterfly
Relevant links
Acknowledgments
A special thank-you to Thomas Marban, creator of popurls, for giving me a shout-out on the popurls blog.
~ February 17, 2009
Revised February 19, 2009
Comments
This post belongs to Blogwell, personal weblog of Rockwell Schrock.