Tag Archives: bloglines

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Goodbye bloglines, hello google reader and Spam

3 Comments

Another brief technical update for folks.
I decided to switch RSS readers today. There are a couple reasons for this.

  1. I don’t like having to log-in to multiple sites, and seeing as a use gmail when not at my home computer, using google reader seems like an easy step.
  2. Google reader has a number of nice features, easy starring, easy sharing and more. This will help me quickly browse the things I’m interested in reading and tag them to read at a later date. Hopefully thus saving time.
  3. Because of the sharing feature, I might stop letting list of “items to blog about” from piling up and instead just direct you to my shared items list for insight into the latest things I’m reading about. (Visit here)

Also on a technical note, some folks have been having problems commenting on posts on my site. There are a couple reasons for this.

  1. Do to the semi popularity of my blog, and mostly just because it is on the internet, it is susceptible to spam. Becuase of that I’ve implemented a few spam blockers to catch the 3105 and counting spam messages that have shown up on my blog.
  2. Some of you have been written off as spam. I’m sorry if that has happened and I’m trying to find a way to “whitelist” people so that we don’t run into that problem, but I haven’t found it yet.
  3. The other reason as some have noted for the commenting problems might be an incompatiblity with my new design. Just so everyone knows, I host this blog myself and do the coding and html on my own too (the design is usually borrowed from elsewhere). I’m not an expert and sometimes I don’t know how to make things compatible for everyone. For now your best option would be to: Get Firefox.

Please do me a big favor if you’ve had problems commenting and send me a message through the Contact button up top. I’d really appreciate it. I have visitors coming to this site everyday and I’d like to make it as user friendly as possible.

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Why RSS?

1 Comment

If I have time I’ll try and draw a diagram of this but for now just bear with me. Think of communication is being one of two things: either a flowing stream or fishing.
I think the reason people like TV is that it is more or less a stream. You turn it on and all the communication comes flowing right out at you, little to no effort on your part. Less people are interested in the Newspaper, it requires more work on your part. You might no you like the sports section, in the same way you know when your favorite show is on, but it still takes some effort.
For most of our use of the web we do quite a bit of fishing. If you want to catch up on the news you fish over at CNN or BBC and scan the stories and pluck out the ones that interest you. With all the blogs and websites out there these days we do a lot of fishing, I would guess most people go to about 5-10 websites a day to catch up on the latest, whatever that might be.
Email is more like a stream, but it’s become such a nasty one (who put that processed meat in there?), that we seem to be doing a lot of fishing in our OWN rainbows (just like in our physical mailboxes).

Welcome RSS. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” You’ll notice these letters stuck in some corner of most websites you browse, or sticking out in a bright orange box. It’s about time you learned what that is. Basically RSS allows you to take the flowing stream of a website you might frequent, and put it into your own pool (like an email subscription on speed). Basically what it allows you to do is take all the text, stories, pictures, etc. that you might be looking at from ten different websites each day and allows you to put them all into one. It’s like a customized newspaper just for you.

I myself currently use bloglines. In it I have a sidebar with a tech section, friends sections, feedback (people’s comments on my blogs), and more. The beauty is basically that on one page I can check 45 (and more as I add them) different webpages to see if there is any new information I might be interested in. It gets even cooler as you start looking into search RSS (I can see everytime a new result comes up under “ariah fine” on an msn.com search, and I will know whenever a blog has the word “ariah” in it). I can’t tell you how much time this ends up saving. I mean it really really does.

The other neat thing is that using a RSS reader like bloglines allows me to seperate my reading material from real communication. I’ve changed about 90% of the email subscriptions and things that I had over to my bloglines account. This way, when I hear the ding that I have new mail I’m fairly confident it’s a personal communication. And when I’m good and read I can look at bloglines and read all the things that might bore me, interest me, and cause me to waste hours of time.

So is anyone interested in some helping setting up a bloglines account?

[bloglines]