Well I’ve upgraded hosting on my Snowmoblog site. I’m going to work on keeping some new content going there over the winter.
I’m a snowmobile nut, so I guess it was a matter of time to start a snowmobile blog, actually I started it last spring! The reality of it all is that there is always a lack of news and such over the summer, so the site sat unattended for a few summer months.
Now that cooler weather is invading the northland (I’m in Minnesota), its time to dust off Snowmoblog and get things in gear. That started Friday with an upgrade to full hosting instead of “freebie” status, and getting the RSS feeds working right away.
Keep tuned in if you’re a snowmobiler – I’m going to focus on having fun, the glossy mags can keep up on the racing stuff and “rode reports” as it were. Snowmoblog will be updated with real-world experiences – frozen lakes, getting lost in the woods, favorite watering holes – you know how it is!
While I’ve unsubscribed from Dave’s Scripting News feed for the time being, I also have to give him kudos for developing and describing the River of News view. Over the past 2+ years that I’ve been using RSS for news consumption, I’ve tried about 10 or so different readers, out of which I ended up with Pluck for at least a year and a half.
This summer, however, I started playing around at other readers again and ran across a post somewhere espousing the benefits of Google Reader. So I tried it, and liked it – a lot. I’d tried several River of News views before, but GReader seems to hit the sweet spot for me. Reading and marking posts in GReader’s “All Items” view (by newest) is the most efficient way for me to read feeds now – I can’t even go back to feed-by-feed reading any longer.
Also, after reading Scoble’s use of GReader’s sharing feature, I also discovered my own personalized Link Blog. Neat how that works – if anyone is interested in what I’m reading, they can simply view my link blog. Its the actual posts I read from my list of feeds.
It is and it isn’t. This weekend, I’ve gone back to several services that I had joined many months ago to check them out again. Namely ClipMarks, NewsVine and del.icio.us. The only one I had found useful at the time was ClipMarks, and it mainly for a storage place for things I found interesting on the Internet. One problem I had with these services was that I didn’t “get” them. They were interesting, but didn’t click for me at the time.
Now I think I get it. I’ve been posting items to all these services, and integrating the feeds and information back here into my blog. The interesting thing is I finally went from my “view” of the service to the front page again and found all the content from other users streaming in. That was the part I had been missing, these services (and others of course) are best consumed when you view all the incoming streams of information – not just our individual contributions.
There is the metaphor of my problem with technology. Ever since I’ve been interested in technology, I’ve worked hard to understand how things work, how the software works, how it interacts with other software/services/hardware. So much so that my career long ago had taken a turn to follow that – I’m a tech-geek to the core. What I failed to understand was how these services where intended to be used.
Well now that I’ve figured out the basics, I’m going to embrace them along with the rest of my Web 2.0 services that I use. Neat stuff, but I’ll keep working to understand how their used in new and better ways.
So now I hear Pluck is shutting down their RSS Reader(s). While I gave up Pluck and other client-side news aggregators in early September, I had used Pluck for a long time.
The rich feature set, ability to share my feed list automatically between multiple computers and browsers was its biggest draw. Also, I really enjoyed the format, where it plugged into your favorite browser as a side-panel where you could scroll through the list of feeds and click away reading easily through each category.
Since I’ve moved to Google Reader, I won’t be moving back to a client-side aggregator. I’ve got my feeds in one spot that I can access from practically anywhere. The “River of news” views, either by category or by date, has won be over. The ability to quickly scan the most recent conversations is a huge productivity boost.
Still I will miss Pluck, and I have to apologize to everyone that I recommended it to as they will now need to move on to another reader. My latest recommendation on that? Google Reader of course!
I finally got a chance to start using the “Share” feature in Google Reader. Its very cool, when you share a story/post from a feed in Google Reader, it is added to you’re Google Reader Link Blog. Mine is located here.
It’s impressive, because it pulls the full post from the original site, and adds a line below the title crediting the original source. Very neat and very simple.
The great part of something like a link blog is that you can share what articles and blog posts that you think are interesting. These shared articles are presented in a simple blog format that changes as often as you want it to.
If you’re currently using Google Reader, start sharing the articles and posts of interest to you – they will automatically be added to your own link blog that you can point your readers to. Do you have a link blog? If so, share the URL here, it’d be great to see what others are reading.
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Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
