Monday, October 30, 2006

RSS is taking over my life

Ever since my good friend Black Knight posted this article about, and I quote, being an 'RSS junkie', I'd been thinking 'gee, there must be something to this RSS stuff after all. BK is Wise In The Ways Of The Interwebthing™, and must therefore Know Something Important That I Don't™.'

Well, turns out he does. Actually, lots of things, but this one in particular. Drat him.

So I signed up online, as we do in this Brave New Information Age, for Newsgator, which, truth be told, seems to handle the task well and plays nicely with RSS and XML, even to the point of aggregating content from Blogspot domains that I can't get at from inside the institutional firewall. Perfect.

Except...



Bloody heck. It's Monday morning, I looked at the thing twice on the weekend, and there are 69 new articles to view (excluding all personal blogs, which, of course, I wouldn't be reading at work, oh no, not at all).

I know, I know... I should stop whining, I asked for it. It's sort-of necessary that I scan the articles in these journals (like some others of you that read this blog... BK, TRT (probably), et al. - the rest of you can count yourselves lucky). This is a much better solution than the alternative endless parade of email announcements, which get randomly spam-trapped/ignored/deleted out of hand.

Anyway, this is merely the most recent episode in the Neverending Story Of How Ricardipus Got His Groove On With 21st Century Technology©. Next week - how to encode mp3 files from four-track cassette tapes and upload them to the web, using an aging Pentium II with no CD burner, no internet connection, and a parallel port Zip drive. It's a new definition of pain, believe me.

Gotta go read some RSS now. Argh.

8 comments:

WrathofDawn said...

*Her ears perked up at the mention of 'can't get at from inside the institutional firewall' and she gets led, yet again, down the technological garden path.*

No good can come of this.

Rik said...

Dawn sounds like she's having fun...

As for RSS, I installed it, it told me I had 1000+ news articles to read, I uninstalled it.

Anonymous said...

But Rik, it's just like the old days of photocopying journal articles: That was sufficient, you didn't have to read the damn' things. Same for taping TV shows - as good as watching them.

"Did you see the paper by Master & Bates?"
"It's in my RSS feed."
"Excellent!"

WB: fkqoimp The sound of three hundred RSS articles hitting R'pus's computer.

Richard Wintle said...

ohhsq! - the sound Ricardipus makes when that happens.

WrathofDawn said...

wiqgybg - The sound that Dawn makes after Hallowe'em.

Too.Much.Sugar.

WrathofDawn said...

And what did the wee Ricardipi wear as costumes? Hmmm?

Mine are too old for trick or treating, so I have to live vicariously through other's children now.

qjojt - Something Pinky from "Pinky & the Brain" would say.

Richard Wintle said...

Junior Ricardipus #1 = big blue T. Rex. Why blue? Why not?

Junior Ricardipus #2 = princess. Without a hat ("it's not comfortable!").

Mrs. Ricardipus - cat.

Mr. Ricardipus - disgruntled scientist aka my evil twin aka couldn't be arsed to dress up. I did put some spooky decorations and lights up though.

'gqffa' - a guffaw, in Arabic.

WrathofDawn said...

A T.Rex, princess and cat (plus disgruntled scientist) Excellent choices, all!

vbxcus - some kind of swear word. or perhaps a former swear word.