If you haven't seen it yet, or you know someone who would benefit from using feed reader and doesn't know how they work or why they're a more efficient way to use a good portion of the Internet, watch http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english and forward it on. That video does an excellent job at explaining, simply and understandably, how RSS works and why it is a better model.
Recently I decided to try out Google Reader (why not, I'm using them for mail and calendaring already) to see if I preferred it over RSS Bandit, a client-side application I have used previously. I do, it rocks, I love it, check it out if you haven't already. I'm finding myself spending more and more time in IE 7 or Firefox 2 (I usually have both open) and less time in client side applications. I think my normal mode is to have IE 7, FireFox 2, a shell prompt or two, a Putty window or two, and one or two IM clients running.
The key step when you try out Google Reader is to make sure you add a feed for this blog into it. Absolutely essential. Cough.
Normally (if the website has set the appropriate META headers in their HTML) you can enter just the page you're at or the main page for the site and RSS readers can find the feed from there, so enter 'http://www.myshoggoth.com/' and you should be good to go!
I told Tenzil yesterday "me:Firefox::Ozy:emacs" which means nothing to anyone else who might read this, but you get the idea I'm sure. I have four tabs in Firefox that are always protected and locked: Gmail, Google Reader, Google Notebook, and Joe's Goals. Otherwise, as you say, IM client and putty and I'm good to go. (I tried using Meebo for my IMing and for one reason or another I stopped. I periodically consider going back to it, though.)
The one thing I haven't really gotten my head around is the home pages like iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes, and all that. I dunno why, just can't get my head around them.
Posted by: Random | 2007.07.01 at 07:51