As I’m sure you all know from my incessant babbling about technology, I’ve become a strong proponent of the RSS reader. It’s, as near as I can tell the best way to collect information for later consumption in a manner that is easy to read, reliable in an environment where internet connections might not be constant, and I can scan an item in the feed reader in about half the time it would take me to read the same amount of content in a web page. So it’s a great thing.
I do have an annoyance to report though. Blogger, which for a long time, I would avoid reading almost entirely, has instituted a feed system, using the Atom standard/spec. I initially thought I’d hate atom, but it turns out that atom feeds are more likely to be full text (I rather despise partial text feeds which only capture a very small amount of the joy that is syndication, with little if any to benefit to site administrators) So I’ve started to read Blogger powered blogs. Rock on, right?
Well no. Seems blogger trigger’s updates seemingly at will, so the time-stamps get refreshed, and my news-reader thinks all the entries are updated, when in fact, blogger can’t keep the date right, and I end up having to scan through more to realize that I’ve read the same article half a dozen times before. Thumbs down.
The second complaint I have about RSS, is that my reader won’t download image files, so I have to have a live connection to read an entry that has images posted with the entry, which means I have to be connected to read knitting blogs, which I see as a disadvantage. Anyone have a fix for this?
That’s about it for now. I’d like to be entertained at the fact that I had a brain death moment last night, and then proceeded to write an entry about evolutionary theory and teleology in developmental psychology. Clearly it was an odd form of brain death. Well, onto other projects this evening, I just wanted to get the syndication frustrations out there.
Cheers, tycho