Abaculus

Tony nagged me for ages, to use a RSS feed. I responded, along the lines of I don't need any more technology in my life, thanks. He persisted, and ended up sending me Blog Navigator, just to try as a temporary measure. I gave in, in the interests of maintaining a relationship with our colonial outpost.

That was over a month ago, and I diligently inputed 20 blogs I read. Blogger ones were skipped, as either they don't support RSS or there's some complicated way to do so, but I quite frankly have no desire to find out at this point in time. Unless, of course, someone wants to give it to me in ABC using the comment feature.

Blog Navigator, I've been using on a daily basis for a month. No surfing to every single blog to check out if it has been updated. No looking like a stalking-freak, visiting someone's page a tad too many times, disproportionate to the number of times they post. Navigator did the work for you.

I didn't quite appreciate my love affair with RSS, until yesterday morning. My free trial had expired. Would you believe it, I was gutted. Waves of frustration ran through me, and it was almost as if I was being deprived of some convenience drug. Surfing to each blog seemed too much like hard work. Besides, I couldn't remember all the blog addresses, as they were now stored in Navigator, well out of reach. Frustration abound indeed.

By coincidence, Tony had sent me a link comparing RSS feeds the day before. I wasted absolutely no time revisiting this, and picking another feed. I'm now using Bloglines. This is a feed I'd come across before, but it was just something that I had read about.

Bloglines is a web based RSS feed. This is what I think of it so far:

a) The notification symbol you can download onto your computer, is cool. It checks blogs every 30 seconds, for updates. However, it notifies you by playing a stupid sound. Completely useless, if you are Deaf, or you have turned your computer sound off. That said, I can simply click onto the B icon on my task bar, and check.

b) There are no graphic's of a person's blog displayed. As a visual person, I want to see the layout. I want to see if they've changed their picture. Design sometimes matters. Why the plain white background?

c) If someone has posted more than one entry, you may only want to read one entry now, and the rest later. All blog messages are displayed as read, on one click. I'm not sure if this suits my surfing, and more to the point multi-tasking. I might start to do read something, and come back to the rest a couple of hours later.

d) No offline reading, which currently I would not make use of.

Apart from my immediate frustration with using another interface, and going away from the familar, Bloglines suits my needs for now. It also does have an integrated Blogroll too, which I should start to make use of. Its online feature makes it useful for travelling.

For those who have not discovered the joys of RSS yet, be prepared for something that changes the way you use the internet, information management but something that encourages overload too. The article on various feeds, can be found here, and there are other articles online.