Against my better judgement (see solitary comment), I uploaded my static list of feeds and RSS subscriptions to Share Your OPML.
'Subscriptions like Mine' tells me that my love match (with an impressive strength rating of 36.371) is none other than, Number 1, Eddie Awad.
The wedding is on Saturday July 22. Please, no presents. All donations to charity.
Obviously all loyal readers of this humble blog (from August 2005 with proof) are all invited. The remainder (Johnny Come Lately's) are on the reserve list (i.e evening reception only).
Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ?
I used to smile when people like Robert
Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of
partial versus full RSS feeds.
I used to think 'Crikey. Aren't there more serious things in life to worry about ?' (football and music to name just two).
But now I agree that partial feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Partial feeds seem to defeat the whole point of RSS and I am growing to hate that tantalising '...'
I have configured Netvibes which looks excellent and is rapidly becoming my one stop home page, RSS reader, search engine, portal, email, calendar, calculator, everything.
Everything that is apart from being able to read blogs by people who insist on using partial RSS feeds.
People who insist on publishing partial feeds (step forward all you Oracle bloggers) are now forcing me to click another button in order to read their articles in all their glory.
Another click isn't the end of the world but please remember that I am very lazy. It is also a context switch into another application (browser) when Netvibes is perfectly able of displaying the content.
I can understand commercial sites using partial feeds as they rely on advertising revenue so they have an interest in pulling people to the actual site. However for personal bloggers just writing for fun, I don't see the point.
Well, actually, of course, I do see the point. Some personal bloggers are not just doing it purely for fun. They are doing it to see if what they are writing is actually of interest to anybody and whether anyone is watching.
That's why they publish partial feeds, forcing the interested reader along to the site and incrementing the precious stat counter by one.
When I recently plugged this blog into a statistics counter, I toyed with killing my Feedburner feed (WordPress has a perfectly good feed) and converting to a partial RSS feed. Both of these changes would force people to my site, increase my traffic and boost my ego.
However, I decided against because some people may prefer Feedburner (for whatever reason) and other readers may prefer to read my words from within their favoured RSS reader without that extra click.
So I decided not to risk antagonising my audience (of two) and to leave well alone.
I currently use
MyYahoo! as my home page. I have looked at MyYahoo's next
incarnation, played with Google's
personalised home page and Windows
Live! but none are as flexible as I would like.
So, prompted by the only other Oracle gentleman with enough taste to choose WordPress,
Rahul, I decided to experiment a little with
Netvibes.
Out of the box, the default Netvibes
screen doesn't look too remarkable. A widget for Gmail, a search box, example RSS feeds and the obligatory Flickr feed to display other peoples lovely cats on your home page.
However, the real power of Netvibes lies in the power and flexibility to configure the page(s) to be exactly what you want, where you want and how you want.
Thankfully, the
signup page is blissfully simple so you get an account immediately and painlessly.
One of the main things I am interested in is a personalised portal with access to all my RSS feeds. Simply click on 'Add Content' and you can either add individual feeds by URL or, in my case,
import my OPML from Newsgator Online.
Wait a few seconds and all my RSS feeds are successfully
imported and, even better, my hierarchy is preserved. Impressive.
You can simply select an individual RSS feeds from the available list. This presents a brief
summary and the option to add the feed to the current page.
Clicking on an article of interest opens up the detailed RSS reader. This is a fairly standard two pane
view and you can click through to the Web site.
Netvibes offers multiple tabbed pages. I created several pages including one for all the Oracle blogs I read. I then simply used 'Add to current page' for each Oracle blog to create my personalised Oracle blogs
page.
This is pretty good but when you are actually reading the Oracle blogs, the blog hierarchy on the left of the screen is unused and a needless distraction. No problem - just close it which leaves you with this newspaper style
screen.
Now to see whether there are any articles of interest. Simply click 'Expand all' to
reveal what everyone is talking about.
One of my pet hates about most RSS readers I have
used is that it wasn't easy to select which blog appears first in the list. With Netvibes, it is trivial. If you decide Doug Burns is more interesting than that clown, Andy C, simply
drag'n'drop to put Doug first in the list. No need to rename your favourite authors as 001Doug, 002Tom, 999Andy. This is the year 2006 and Web 2.0 after all.
Each tabbed page can be assigned a pretty
icon and Netvibes comes with a handy set of (growing)
widgets (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, del.ici.ous, Box.net, Ical, ToDo, Weather) in addition to featured RSS feeds.
Overall, an excellent piece of well designed, fast software. Netvibes doesn't have a help page. You simply don't need one due to the intuitive interface.
I started out hoping to find a personalised home page and I discovered a very powerful, customisable RSS reader hidden under covers.
In the first 13 minutes of 20 April 2006, there was a single hit on this blog (no names, no pack-drill). Curiously, the recently added WordPress feed
statistics reported a surprising and rather unlikely number of 53 'estimated number of people who used certain tools to read your feed' in the same period.
Now this is simply not true. Most of these 53 'people' were RSS spiders and automatons dumbly and repeatedly polling for any activity. The associated human being is probably down the pub or asleep.
While the RSS feed may have been subscribed to at some point (by me in all probability) in the past, they are all now sitting unloved and unread in a still born Web 2.0 beta account.
I will stop wasting time evaluating every RSS reader in the universe and simply revert to
NewsGator Online. This will help me to read and enjoy content when I actually have the time and inclination. This will also stop me being distracted by that insidious 'There is 1 new article' irritant which just leads to skim reading lots of irrelevant material in a mindless urge to get 'up to date'.
I will endeavour to constrain my list of feeds to those that I actually read and are of interest. The recent introduction of Technorati
favo(u)rites proved to me that this number was indeed less than 50.
And finally, Cyril. And finally, Esther. I will unsubscribe immediately from Scobleizer's
blog. I am starting to feel like a mindless sheep. I know millions read it and discuss it. I subscribe to it and my eyes see the words but I don't actually read it. He won't mind. He has a big enough audience. Baa.