IMS_Blog

For a while now I’ve been meaning to mention how well I’m getting along with Bloglines. I’d periodically tried the whole RSS thing but could never find a way to read them that I could get along with. I’ve tried stand alone readers and those that integrate to Mozilla (the browser or mail client). Some installed “interesting” default feeds which I gave up on after ten minutes trying to delete those through a clunky interface. Others I just couldn’t see the advantage, somehow it didn’t feel any faster to be clicking through the feeds than it did to be clicking through the web pages. On a dialup connection it’s also pretty annoying to have an aggregator decide to check dozens of feeds for updates. I like the way blog lines allows me to have folders as categories and pulls the feeds together under that folder. I can still deal with feeds individually, but “Science” just says 3 unread items and I don’t have to worry about where from too much. There’s also a nice little extension for Mozilla to inform me when there are unread feeds. And of course all my feeds are available from anywhere with net access, not just a single computer. Oh, and you can set up unique email addresses for mailing lists etc. to act as a “feed”.

I don’t know if this cuts down on the information trawling time. I probably do keep up with various sites better now, but there are simply more of them as well (how easy to click the bookmarklet to add a feed to bloglines). I also sometimes miss seeing the actual design of a site rather than just words that have been blogged, so still find myself occasionally visiting for sentimental reasons if nothing else.

Having said that I do believe that this is, for the now (which seems to last a shorter and shorter time) at least this is the way to go. Neatly, thanks to Ben Hammersley I’ve also got a feed which pushes the results of validating the blog through the XHTML validator, which helps keep on top of breaking validity with posts in which I’ve messed up the markup.

All in all I’m getting more and more used to reading things via RSS (though not general news, I like to pick and choose my stories too much for that I think) and do get a bit frustrated if a site turns out not to have a feed. See how it goes in a month, or whenever the next now is.