Recently having become a more avid user of RSS feeds to keep up not only with my favorite blogs — at least those that have RSS feeds — but also with current events, it seemed like a good time to update my feeds and the images I use to display them. With respect to the feeds, I changed my RSS 0.91 feed to an RSS 2.0 feed, which includes the entire text of each post. (The RSS 1.0 feed, which includes excerpts of each post, I have left as-is).
If the above makes no sense to you, this article is a good place to start. This Mark Pilgrim article might also help (stick to page 1). If you’re interested in reading feeds via a news reader (or “aggregator”), this list by Haiko Hebig has links to a bunch of different options (for the record, I’m using NewzCrawler).
I’ve gone back and forth about news feeds and whether or not this is how I want to read the sites that I like to read. However, recently, as time for blog-reading (not to mention blog-writing) has decreased substantially, I’ve found that by using a news reader, I can keep up with the sites I’m interested in much more efficiently. There was recently an interesting exchange of comments at Ken Loo’s World about people who use news readers possibly being “skimmers.” Naturally the RSS reader allows me to “skim” at a quicker pace, but I wouldn’t agree with the implied notion that somehow I’m affording myself a less-qualitative reading experience, or that somehow RSS is better-suited for link-and-run sites like Instapundit. The fact of the matter is that regardless of whether I’m viewing sites via an RSS reader or my web browser, I do a lot of skimming. The RSS feeds simply allow my to skim faster, so that when I come across those articles that I deem are worth reading, I actually have more time to linger and ponder and reflect, and sometimes comment.
Back to house-cleaning, I also added .gif buttons denoting these feeds, which are variations on buttons created by Jeremy Hedley of Antipixel. A while back Jeremy implored his readers to “steal his buttons,” and I’ve more or less done that, changing them slightly. Thanks Jeremy!
