Flippy - I Rant, You Read

Monday, March 12, 2007

terribly early in the morning

I’ve Succumbed - I’ve Set Up A Feed Reader

I’m just using the Internet Explorer one, as I don’t have any special feed reading needs, except that now that I’m working so much, I can’t keep up with my friends’ blogs.  I hate that.  I also hate using a feed reader, as I like to see the whole pretty picture of a blog, not just the text and the occasional picture in a blog entry.  It was fairly easy to set up since most people have a feed button on their site, and those of you who don’t (Nancy & Helly, I’m looking at you), the formatting is the same for all Blogger blogs, so it’s easy enough to plop atom.xml at the end of the blog url to get the feed info.  One feed I haven’t yet easily figured out is the Vox feed.  Even I don’t have a simple button to click on my Vox blog and there isn’t anything in the settings to easily get one.  I’ll have to look more into it later.  Only two of my friends use it as their main blog, so I think I can manage to check in every couple of days at least.

I downloaded some feed reading software too, but I think it’s way more than I need.  It seems lovely if you want your feeds to do handstands and cartwheels, but I’m okay with mine just sitting there like bumps on a log.  If you’re interested in it though, it’s RSSOwl.  When I have more time to fiddle, I may go back to it.  After all, why use Notepad for text when you can use Microsoft Office Professional for the same thing,  because it’s expensive and fancy?   By the way, my feed reading experiment has helped me catch up on a bunch of my blogs, as I’m able to quickly skim everyone’s new entries…and the reader bolds the blogs if there’s a new entry.