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February 05, 2008
Life : Of RSS and Other Things
The number of blogs I follow seems to be constantly increasing. While I occasionally do “spring cleaning” – removing those blogs on which I haven’t actually read a post recently (or for which there for which there just haven't been any recent posts ) – the number of new blogs I find to read always seems to be greater than the number I punt. I am now up to nearly 30 blogs I follow.
As a result, I have finally decided to switch to reading blogs via their RSS feeds as opposed to going directly to their sites. I have avoided this until now because you lose context (you only see the post, not the whole page); but opening all of those sites has just gotten too tedious (particularly since some of the site are rather irregular in their posts).
I have therefore decided to try out Google Reader to manage my blog-reading. It provides a nice web-based interface not unlike the net-news readers of old. Yes, I have been on the web long enough to have a lot of experience with news groups (A.K.A “usenet news”); and was even around for the “Great Renaming” (a gold star if you know what the “fa.” prefix stood for). With the Google Reader I can find out at a glance from one web page which blogs have new posts. I just have to paste into Google Reader the URLs for the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds for each blog and it does the rest. This is particularly useful for those blogs that rarely or irregularly have new posts. I can now monitor them for new content without having to visit the page frequently.
The only downside I have identified so far is that the frequency with which Google checks for new content depends on the number of people interested in a feed. For most of the sites I follow, that seems to be OK; but I doubt that Google will ever check my blogs as often as I want to monitor them for comments. Even IE7 will not check feeds any faster than once an hour, which is too slow for me. So for this blog I will keep checking it the old fashioned way.
Now that I am a client of RSS feeds, I also realized I needed to update “Sighs and Musings” to be more RSS-friendly. I improved the RSS template for the feed of all of my posts, and created a second feed that lists the comments on the site. By subscribing to both, people can track all activity on my blog. Links to my two feeds can be found near the top of the right column on every page. I wish more sites has comments feeds as there are a few blog where I am as interested in the comments as I am on the original posts.
I also took the opportunity to clean up some other minor issues with my blog templates. Nothing big – the title of the post is now a link to the individual page and the “recent comments” links in the right column now takes you to the comment section of the page such that the new comment should be visible (if not always at the top of the window).
Posted by Steven at February 5, 2008 05:00 AM
