May 31, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Musings on the internet age
I just switched RSS readers, after a friend at Google browbeat me into trying theirs. It works offline now, which is nice, but not quite enough to allay my fears that we will all be renting air from Sergei & co in a couple of years.
Everyone should do this every now and again; it forces you to think about what you actually read. And also, how you read it. I had mine neatly categorised into folders on NewsGator: linkers, science, libertarians, progressives, economics, and so forth. But the "Linkers" folder quickly became a daunting morass into which I rarely ventured, even though it only had five or six blogs in it; the volume was just too overwhelming. And my arts blogs got lost in the shuffle. Now everything's in one big alphabetical list; we'll see how that fares.
However, I'm having pangs of regret that I use a reader at all. My blog reading used to have a much bigger element of serendipity. I never delinked anyone from the bloggroll; as my co-blogger once said, unblogrolling someone is an act of violence. As a consequence, my relationships with blogs waxed and waned. After a while of not reading someone, I'd wonder what they'd gotten up to, and wander over to see. Now, though, they're either in my RSS reader . . . or I won't see them unless someone else points me their way. It's more efficient, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's an overall improvement.
Posted by Jane Galt at May 31, 2007 5:12 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksHope you're continuing to have good luck with the Google Reader. I actually just switched to Google from Bloglines a month or so ago myself.
I personally use the big long alphabetical list, too, but Google Reader lets you categorize into folders, too. The tool to do that is in the "Feed Settings" drop-down box in the upper right of the screen.
My favorite "new" feature coming from the Bloglines world is that a post is only considered "read" if you've actually scrolled to it and looked at it, where in Bloglines once you click on a blog every current post is immediately marked as "read", even if there are 30 new posts and you don't have time to read a tenth of them.
Am I missing something? I recently switched to Google Reader (mostly because it works passably well on my handheld), and the only feed I can find for this blog is http://www.janegalt.net/index.rdf, which seems only to be quick summaries with click throughs for the final article. Which is OK, I guess, when I'm not using my handheld, but a bit of a pain, when I am. Is there another feed I'm missing, or is this it?
I recognize that this inconveniences our proprietoress very little as I imagine she does not need to read her own blog via an RSS reader to find out what she's up to.
Have you tried Netvibes? (www.netvibes.com - no personal affiliation). Not purely a RSS reader, but I found it more powerful and easy to use.
There's no reason you can't throw every site you ever even consider returning to into your RSS reader, using folders to hide them away until you want to return to them.
One thing I do is keep all my regular reads in Google Reader and any Blogs that I occasionally glance at I save as live bookmarks in my browser (i.e. firefox). That way when I've exhausted the items in my Google Reader and I still want to procrastinate, then I just have a flick through the live bookmarks and see if any of the headlines sound interesting. Don't worry your blog makes it to the Google Reader list. :)
Hey, yeah--I'm with Brett. Jane's blog is the only one among the twenty or so I read on G Reader that is not full content. What's up with that?
Lee,
Asymmetrical Information currently appears to be a "partial" RSS feed. You can learn more about the "full vs partial RSS feeds" debate at
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/do-you-publish-full-text-feeds-or.html
Jane, will you PLEASE switch to full feeds? I use Google Reader as well, and I have NOT subscribed to your blog specifically because I hate partial feeds. I check in on you every now and then, but it's always such a pain to catch up...
Yes, full feeds, please! Go read Kendall's link for lotsa reasons why... and let's just say that I very much doubt you'll ever get someone leaving a comment on a blog entry asking for truncated feeds!
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