11/21/07

RLS (Really Lazy Syndication)

I have dragged my feet about using RSS feeds for a long time. "Really simple" indeed - sure, they keep everything in one place, but you need an extra application or web application to do it, which has always felt extraneous to me. (But I am oversensitive to redundancy, I think.) Plus, it strips everything down - it doesn't matter what I've set up my blog to look like if you read it as a feed. So I've just kept the links to blogs I read in my bookmarks bar and clicked through them two or three (or twenty or thirty, depending on my level of procrastination) times a day. I don't read many blogs anyway, so it works. But I just bought a new Macbook (more stuff on that probably coming later, once I've used it for a while) with OS X Leopard, and this version of Mail lets you add RSS feeds in the sidebar with your other folders and alerts you when you have a new article, just like a new email message. OK, so not that revolutionary, I'm sure Google figured this out long ago, etc. - but this is RSS for the really lazy. I don't have to go online at all, I'm in my mailbox all the time anyway, and it's completely automated. I may have just been converted to the RSS way of life.