Like TiVo for the Internet

January 29th, 2004

I'm now officially drowning in web pages I read every single day. My current daily count is up to 142 PPD. If you were to average that out at 5 minutes per page, I read the same web pages for 710 minutes, or 11 hours and 50 minutes a day, and that doesn't include all of the pages that are linked to from my primary reading.

Fortunately I don't actually have to read all of these pages. Most of the pages have the same content, just re-written in someone else's words. For example, today the big stories were the Pepsi iTunes thing, the G5 case mod story, the Pixar / Disney snafu, Apple fixing iBooks for free, and many others. How could I possibly absorb all of this information without actually reading the pages?

In walks the wonder of RSS. What is RSS? Well, that was another story, but the gist is, if you ain't got it - get it.

I have this wonderful application called netnewswire (the lite version). It pulls in all of those little links you see on peoples pages called "XML", "RSS", "syndicate this site", "Feed", or whatever other clever incarnation somebody came up with, and "aggregates" all of this information for me in text only versions of the stories of the day. In addition, it tells me when any of my daily reads are updated so that I'm always up-to-date. Now I can just scan the headlines, and read what looks interesting, while I avoid the cruft.

Why am I telling you this? Firstly, I was telling some folks at work today (one of them my IT guy) about all of this RSS stuff and they looked like I was speaking in h4xor. Nextly, I am planning some redesign on the site and RSS will become a little more noticable so I thought I would save some confusion.

Tech | Comments (2) | words in this post

Comments

  1. Teresa
    February 2, 2004 11:34 AM

    Wow, all this snow is giving you a lot of time to blog...

  2. Mom
    February 5, 2004 08:10 AM

    all this snow is also helping you learn a new language I don't understand. But I'm glad you do...

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