Monday, November 17, 2003

RSS feeds and aggregators.

There are so many blogs that I have enjoyed a read or two and wanted to go back to in the future, that my browser was getting overwhelmed by favorite places. It takes a lot of time to check each and every one to see if there is content that I might want to spend time thinking about. There are the philosophical, the political, the eclectic, the people that I find interesting no matter which sort of content they are writing, the internal/external journey sort, the always have food for thought sort and so on. I have grown to depend on the online aggregator I use at Bloglines to quickly see if there are entries that I want to read and get the flavor of a new blog find to determine if it ought to be in a permanent category.

The problem is that not everyone has an rss/xml feed. I haven't been able to spend the time to set up one for myself and have wandered around to different places and found a few that will create one for me. The one that appears to be the best is Blogmatrix, but they won't create a feed for someone else.

Blogstreet is the next best for creating scraped feeds of others blogs. But they can't create a feed for everyone. Third choice is myRss, but their selection for a scraped feed is often whatever link one might put in their post or else it is the date only and the updates are only once a day.

Which ever one I use, I then put the created rss feed into the aggegator at Bloglines and can tell when the blog is updated and determine quickly if I want to read the entry. It is a real time saver and can be accessed from home or campus. If I were reading only from home, then I would see about one of the downloadable aggregators because their functionality might be better and I would include the news sources I read daily.

A blog I stumbled upon today is angelsandfrogs. I am still trying to create a feed but there appear to be several entries that I enjoyed enough that I want to check future entries.

I am still working on multiple papers and trying to catch up for the Saturday and Sunday morning away. We left one of our cars in the Fallbrook area to be fixed and my sister drove us home. That was 4 hours out of her Sunday. We will have to go back probably next weekend to pick up the car, and it makes no sense to drive that far and not see her even though we will be there for Thanksgiving too. I wish for the Star Trek transporters that would make it simple to get where we want to go.

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