fine whine

A while back my web browsing took on a new idiom: that of me going basically to the same seven sites or so every day, hungry for updates. I shouldn't admit it, but for a long time I was even hooked on slashdot and would reload the front page several times a day, just to see the very bleeding edge of geeky news. Those days have long since passed, but I would still find myself haunting the same few sites, a personal page here, and there and then community-derived lists of interesting links and news, and that was about it.

Then I started doing daily tours of my friends' sites, waiting for updates and occasionally chiming in on the conversations. I wasted a lot of time refreshing un-updated pages, though, and probably sent my workstation usage data through the roof. Not that I worry about that sort of thing, but whisperings and mumblings and half-hearted rumors occasionally contain a grain of truth, don't they?

So anyway, there had to be a better way. Enter Bloglines, a web service to aggregate the news from all the sites I visit based on a wonderful and cryptic technology called RSS. One that I'd used many, many years ago when Netscape first backed it and largely forgot, but now it allows me to see in one single page every update to all the sites that matter to me.

Slick, sleek and chic it may be, but I lose the ability to comment on items directly and also to see the ensuing conversations. I need only click on certain links to do so, but I'd like that functionality at my instant disposal, dammit. All of this is really an excuse to all y'all bloggers as to why I don't comment on your stuff anymore. It's not you, it's me. Really.

Try Bloglines, though. It's changed the way I look at things, in a manner of speaking. I'll be adding a "subscribe to this site with Bloglines" link eventually.