Well, you could at least sign the petition if you feel that stron
When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the
River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been
mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.
Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn't enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.
This effect is spoiled by the lengthy verbosity of the full text feed for articles you are not interested in whatsoever.
The ideal compromise would be a 2 line precis of the article but
Peter Scott is the only blogger in the universe who is
thoughtful enough to do this.
I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in
Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content.
My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the
Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave
Winer's controversial '
River of News' concept.
Now my previous experiments with
Joomla and subsequently
WordPress and
Drupal have been made incredibly easy by
Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache).
And so it proved again. A mere 7 minutes to get Gregarius working. A further 29 minutes to fail to work out why Netvibes has chosen to resurrect and export some dear, dead departed
feeds (with Japanese writing) from beyond the grave.
Gregarius has the conventional
two pane (feed-article) view and you can quickly review all articles from all blogs in reverse date order. You can then choose to expand any
articles of particular interest.
Of course, for the full cascading river
effect, I had to collapse the feeds and remove all
tags, folders and categories to simply let all feeds flow as one raging torrent. There are no Oracle blogs anymore. You are all fighting for a place on the raft.
The default Gregarius theme is a little monochrome for my liking or maybe that is the default 'Newspaper' view (black and white and read all over) but there are other
themes available to liven up the RSS experience.
So now I am no longer skimming my 81 feeds but blissfully wallowing in this river of news.
All of this excitement is almost enough to encourage me to investigate pricing (again) for hosted PHP/mySQL providers so I can read the same feeds from multiple computers.
No-one ever asks me: 'Hey Norman, why don't you have a blogroll with 457 interesting, thought provoking sites for me to look at ?'.
Firstly, while I find the reading lists of others interesting and a useful means of discovering new sources, I don't particularly want an lengthy blogroll adding yet more clutter to my (sort of) minimalist blog.
Secondly, my RSS reading lists are stored on a
Netvibes server. I have separate tabs for 'Oracle', 'WordPress', 'Sport', 'News', 'Blogs', 'Tech', 'Software' and a small one called '
UK'. I would love to be able to publish these tabs and share the contents with everyone.
Ideally, I would like to publish all my Netvibes tabs somewhere which would always reflect my subscriptions. This would ensure that the lists are always up to date and reflect my
current reading list so transient blogs (like World Cup 2006) and dead blogs would be removed.
Netvibes has a
ecosystem for sharing resources but I am not quite sure whether this does precisely what I want. If I wasn't so lazy, I might investigate further.
One thing I like about
Bloglines is the tight and seamless integration of the 'My Feeds' reading list with the Bloglines blog. The blogroll on the Bloglines blog is always synchronised with the Bloglines reading list. Automatically. No need to think about it. No need to export your OPML and upload it (again). Bloglines manages this for you. OK - it was the only thing I liked about my Bloglines
blog but still.
This is exactly how it should be and what
Share Your OPML is sadly lacking. Share Your OPML has some promising features for popular and common feeds, feed discovery, recommendations and match
making. However, while I can
share my feeds on Share Your OPML, this is merely a static, outdated list.
The onus is on me to remember to do something i.e. export my reading list from my current RSS reader and upload a modified OPML file at recurring, regular intervals.
This is a lot of tedious work for me to do. Computers are much better at this sort of stuff than humans. We are in 2006 and using Web 2.0 after all. Finally, please remember that I am very, very
lazy.
So, that's why I don't have a blogroll.
A modern, standards compliant RSS
feed. Whatever next. Let's hope people take this opportunity to switch to a
full feed.
Odd to compare Google's relative inactivity with all the features, languages, statistics, themes and functionality added to
WordPress in the last six months.