Feed your mind

   There has been some distress recently in J-Land (AOL's blogging community) over non-delivery of new update e-mail alerts via AOL's alert system. AOL members, reading AOL blogs, can click on a link that says "alert me as entries are posted" and they will receive an e-mail notification of new posts to that blog. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.
   In practice, e-mail alerts are intermittent, at best. While I still subscribe to e-mail alerts to inform me when new comments are posted in my blogs, I long ago gave up on reliably receiving new entry alerts for the AOL journals I read.
   Not that that was the only problem I had with reading blogs. Only about a third of the blogs I read are AOL journals, so AOL's e-mail alerts did not cover two thirds of my daily reading list. At first, I simply bookmarked all my regular haunts in my favourite places folder, and checked them all every day.
   How often do you update your blog? Every day? I know I certainly don't, and with a few exceptions, most of my reading list do not either. Clicking into every single blog on the list every day, when a significant proportion of them are not updated struck me as a huge waste of my time. As the number of blogs I read approached triple figures, that waste of time became significant enough for me to want to do something about it.
   Enter the RSS aggregator, or feed reader.

   Most blogs (certainly all AOL journals) publish a syndication feed along with the regular web page. The syndication feed carries a simplified version of each entry a blogger makes: the basic text, and sometimes images, without the more complicated html coding. So, for example, a blog's colour scheme, or other fancy formatting doesn't come through on the RSS feed.
   A feed reader, or aggregator, is a piece of software that will save your list of feeds (blogs) and check them all for you, whenever you want, and tell you which ones have been updated since last you checked. It is then often possible to read those updated entries right in the feed reader, without clicking through to the blog itself. If you read a lot of blogs, this is an invaluable tool that will save you hours every week.

   A year ago, feed readers were a somewhat esoteric luxury enjoyed only by the most geeky among us. It was a big deal when the new version of Safari, the Mac Internet browser, came with one built in. Being somewhat cautious about downloading new software, I went looking for an online solution, and found bloglines.com. Bloglines offers the ability to create a list of feeds, organise them into various categories, and check them regularly, by simply visiting, and logging into the website.
   You can see what my list looks like by clicking on the link called My complete blogroll in the right sidebar of my main page. What you will see is a column on the left side of the screen with five main categories listed. Clicking on the little plus symbol beside a category name will expand the list to show the feeds in each one. Clicking on one of the blog titles will bring up the available feeds for that blog in the larger window on the right. Cool, huh?
   You'll notice that some of the feeds are not blogs. I have subscribed to several web comics. As well, all of the online news services publish RSS feeds which you can subscribe to. I even receive updates of any new activity at Meanderingly, an online writing project I contribute to, which is a Wiki.

   Some recent glitches at bloglines prompted me to go out and investigate other feed reading options, such as Mozilla Firefox extensions like NewsFox and Sage, and stand alone readers, like Feed Demon. Then, in researching this article, I discovered that most major web portals have now incorporated feed reading into their web pages. For example, if you visit your favourite AOL journal, and click on the link at the top called 'Get the feed.' you will see a box pop up offering to help you subscribe via one of six online feed reader options, including My AOL, Google, and My Yahoo!
   Out of curiosity, I click on the Google reader link, and was immediately taken to a page that offered to let me use either Google Homepage, or Google Reader to subscribe. I clicked Google reader, went through a brief registration process, and boom, I was reading my favourite blog in an RSS aggregator. Neato!

   Try it, you'll like it.

tags: Blogging