Aggregate This

Having been an avid LJ-er for a number of years, I loved how I could see all the blog entries of my friends and communities, all feeded on to one convenient page. Livejournal may not have been the first to do this, but I certainly think they did it best.

So when I started to getting into blogging, I enquired to several people, of whom I considered to be fairly computer saavy, about a way that I could see all of my favourite blogs on one handy page. The consensus seemed to be that was a great idea, but nothing that they knew of could do that.

However it was a short time after that, that I discovered what that little orange box on the side of the page was for. You see that little orange box that says "subscribe" next to it? Yeah, that one. That was the answer to my question.

Meet the RSS reader. Brilliant little device that lets you do just that,get all your blogs aggregated on to one page. I was surprised about how few people actually knew about this.

Anyways, even after I had found out about RSS, I decided not to use one. I realized I perfered to see the content directly from the source. So I decided to continue to read blogs the way I had been doing previously, by simply bookmarking all the pages and going through them one by one every morning.

Now this method worked just fine for me. That is, until my primary computer was crippled by Vista. And since then I've been making do with using the library computers, internet cafes, and a generous friend or two. Suffice to say, all my bookmarked pages were lost and keeping up with blogs became impossible.

Since that time I've barely been reading any of them. So it made sense to finally capitalize on this free service.

So there you go. I now have 102 items lined up on my google reader, and about 30ish podcasts that I've missed in the past three months or so to listen to.

In short, RSS is your friend, I am dumb for not getting one three months ago, and Rick Sanchez is growing on me.

Huh? Rick Sanchez? Oops, more on that tomorrow...