So.
My RSS aggregator is dead.
Actually, there’s been a lot of computer crap around these parts. Remember, a year ago, when amongst the questions for Gentle Readers YHB asked about my tortoise-like computer? Well, I finally decided to go ahead and pay for RAM, to get my old machine from 120MB to 1G. Once the sticks got put in, the computer began rebooting itself every ten minutes, just for fun. Well, I’ve got to the point where half the purchased RAM allows the computer to more or less work without interruption, and I am able once again to use a relatively recent iTunes (well, 4, but there it is). And, of course, once something changes in a chaotic system such as Windows OS, there are odd and unpredictable repercussions, which include a completely bitched RSS reader.
Now, there are worse things than a screwy aggregator. For one thing, I could always get another aggregator. I could even upgrade my current one, which is 1.0.7 of a program with a 1.5.0.8. You know, I remember when it was a joke that somebody would release a 1.5 edition. Anyway, I could easily get a working aggregator again, and I probably should get right on that. On the other hand, it’s been interesting to be without it for a couple of weeks now.
I was up to about forty feeds on the aggregator before it went wacky on me. One set concerned themselves with news about the San Francisco Giants, and I am probably better off without the off-season rantings about who has been signed, and where, and for how much, and for how long. I can keep up with the important news without trying very hard, and the odds are that I will have a working reader before Pitchers and Catchers Report.
Then there was the set of blogs that didn’t get updated often enough. Although it’s true that Clive Thompson chose the moment of aggregator failure to not only return to blogging, but wonder if RSS feeds meant that he would get back a fair percentage of his pre-hiatus readers, on the whole, I think I can reasonably just give up on Mark Schmitt updating The Decembrist. Although, you know, Mr. Thompson is right, insofar as if Mr. Schmitt did update his blog, and if I did have it on my aggregator, I would be happy to know about it and read it. And if he starts updating and I miss it, I’ll be all cranky. And I’ll probably keep clicking on Baraita, because, hey, she took two months off this summer and came back with a bunch of really interesting posts. But then, it’s annoying to keep clicking and not see any new posts, and I get cranky that way, too.
As for the ones that do update every day (or nearly, in some cases not nearly enough), I can click on them once a day or so and be happy most days. I am more likely to be sucked into reading long comment threads on, say, the Whatever, and that is a Bad Thing, but then I could presumably exert self-control. Or something. At any rate, I am reading new entries reasonably quickly after they are posted, and not spending undue time griping about having hit the little button and not getting the tasty treat. The dozen or more LJ feeds, by the way, fit into this category, at least insofar as almost all of them are on one particular Friends Page, which I can check daily (or oftener), and be happy. There is a small subset of LJs that are rarely updated which will show up there, because I’m just piggybacking on somebody else’s aggregator. I could, of course, get an LJ my own damn self, just to use it as an aggregator, but I’m not super-extra thrilled by that interface.
So, Gentle Readers. How do you aggregate? Or don’t you? What’s your strategy for keeping up with the blogs/sites that aren’t updated every day? I know this Tohu Bohu doesn’t get aggregated, because I’m stubborn that way, but those other places you waste internet time on, do you just click, or do you let them come to you? Your Humble Blogger wants to know.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
For news and entertainment, I memorize URLs and type them in by hand every day. I don’t use bookmarks, don’t use an aggregator, and wish I did.
For work sites (such as scheduling FedEx pickups), I use either bookmarks or my custom home page on which I’ve put a number of links and search forms.
I use LJ as my aggregator, with some filters (aka “friends groups”, because the site and its terminology were written for twelve year old girls) to divide things into various categories, like the journals of actual friends, webcomics, and news-related stuff, so that if I don’t have time to read them all, I can just read whichever I think are most important or whatever.
Well, I just use LiveJournal, because that’s what it is: one giant aggregator plus a bunch of extra features. You can get a feed for any LJ user’s public posts at:
<http://username.livejournal.com/data/atom>
And any RSS feed can be turned into a limited sort of LJ user called an LJ feed by someone with a paid account.
So I’ve subscribed to the blogs I prefer to read by feed over on LJ. Here’s an example you might find familiar: <http://syndicated.livejournal.com/jedediah/>
(Note that you’ll only see headlines at that page; I see the full content of Jed’s entries on my friends list.)
Of course, that may well not be to your taste, for whatever reason.
Alternatively, I just poked around a little bit with Google Reader. It looks nifty; if I didn’t already use LJ for the purpose, I’d probably go with it.
i use safari. open a folder of links in lots of tabs. feeded (fed?) sites each in their own tab (helps keep the storyline straight). also this morning pile folder is on my bookmarks bar and safari shows the number of new stories right by the folder’s name, so with one click i can read the “new”s. i like fewer apps.
this gets even worse — as i’m reading through the feeds, i open some of the news articles in new tabs, too, to read after the first round reading is done. TABS! dozens and dozens!
I have an LJ friends list for people who have livejournals and are humans i know, and only for that. I have a standalone RSS reader (NetNewsWire Lite, Mac only, i think) for everything that has a feed (including things which happen to be located on LJ but are not in the aforementioned category, like technical blogs). And i have a page of links for webcomics and RSS-devoid things like your blog, which i click through once a day whether it needs it or not. And that is that.
I use Google Reader, which is awesome. I mostly use it for work-related blogs (i.e. software development) but I do have a folder of feeds for friends’ blogs.
Then I also have my My Yahoo page, which has lots of useful links. However, as more and more sites use RSS, I’ve moved to using My Yahoo less and less — the only sites I actually click on to read on a regular basis are yours, the Car Talk column, the Straight Dope, a couple of comics, etc. I’d be pretty pleased if you had RSS, frankly.
Can I really be the only one here using Bloglines?
http://www.bloglines.com/public/capelleg
That’s just *some* of them, mind you, the ones I don’t mind other people (including professional contacts, since this is linked off my public/professional web page) knowing that I read. The full list is some 68 feeds, many of which (in the Library folder) I don’t read currently.
Yes, that’s too many feeds. No, I don’t know what to do about it.
I also have a static HTML page with links to things that don’t have feeds, like this Tohu Bohu, and Tomato Nation, but that got to be too much of a pain to update. I haven’t gotten annoyed enough with Bloglines to look into Google Reader, and I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around how Safari’s RSS features work.
LJ friends list: at first for the dismayingly large number of my friends who set up shop over there, many of them friends-locked for privacy, then later expanded with the feeds from some other journals (like Jed’s Neologos) and a couple of comics.
Firefox tab set: one tab for the LJFL and separate tabs for everything else.