Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Thing 3: RSS

Finally: something 2.0-ish that I was already familiar with. My first foray into the world of RSS was with Sage, a Firefox add-on. I suppose it worked decently enough--I used it for months and I still haven't uninstalled it--but I never really was all that fond of it either. Sage mostly just gives you the text of whatever it is you've linked to, and after a while I missed the bells and whistles of people's sites. And it wasn't much use at all for keeping up with a webcomic!

A number of months ago, I created a Google Reader account. The problem here was that even though I have a link to Google Reader in Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar, which is about as much in my face as you can get, I never get around to actually clicking on the link.

Lately, I've been doing RSS through my various email programs. Both Outlook and Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds. This is proving to be the most satisfactory solution yet. Every time I go online I check my email, and both programs just check RSS feeds automatically while looking for new mail. And once I see that there's something new to read, I'm usually curious enough to go and read it.

I mostly just happen upon RSS feeds that I want to pursue. Funny: in the end, there just aren't that many sites I need to be constantly on top of.

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