How About Some Learn & Play? Thing #8: RSS Feeds

So yeah, Learn & Play, remember that CML initiative that was the generative force behind this blog?

Way Way behind. 

#8 of the 23 Things was learning about RSS Feeds and opening an account in Bloglines.  Which I did, but I have to agree with the many people who posted about Bloglines, that it, uh, sucks.  Didn’t like the interface at all — it was clunky and lacked clarity.  so I’ve abandoned it & haven’t been back, content (at the time) to use my google homepage to monitor feeds. 

But then, novice I am, I suddenly realized that this Google Reader everyone was talking about, was something separate & different from my iGoogle homepage.  So I decided to see what that was all about, and now I am addicted.  I rarely “physically” visit my favorite sites anymore (which does mean I miss the changing headers on Sean’s (yeah that’s who I stole that from) site and any images that accompany Tom Spurgeon’s posts for example) but keep up with everything via my Google Reader. 

To close, here’s a quote that was fed into my Google Reader this past week, from Warren Ellis:

Bloglines: We track your favorite news, blogs, weather, and classifieds so that you don’t have to.  And then we time out whenever you want to log in.  And if we’ve scraped together enough processing power to actually allow you in to your reader, we’ll spin for twenty minutes whenever you select a blog to read.  And then we’ll just erase those entries before you get to read them.  Or maybe, to keep things interesting for you, we’ll spit 404s all over the place and then fall down.  Because, you know, we’re tracking ’em. We didn’t say shit about letting you see them.  Bloglines: you got what you paid for, son.”

It’s a Google world, and I’m just living in it.