So yesterday I wrote all about what sorts of fiction I like to read, and in what parts of my day I have the chance to read it. Truthfully, though, there's a whole other universe of stuff I read throughout my day: other people's blogs.
I used to keep a Safari bookmark list of all the blogs I read regularly, and I'd click "open in tabs" to pull them all up and get reading. That started to get cumbersome when I had more than four or five blogs to read at a time. It got really annoying to flip through all those tabs, most of which had content I'd already seen, scouring for the new stuff that I actually wanted to read in the one or two minutes of time I had. By the time I found the fresh content, it was time to shut my laptop and get the meeting started, get off the bus, etc.
So, like everyone else who knows a thing or two about the Weeb lately, I started collecting RSS feeds. Safari has a fairly decent RSS feed reader, so I started using it to track everything in one place. This was better: all the blog posts I wanted to read were now being aggregated in one place, in reverse chronological order, so the most recent stuff was at the top. Voila, no more shunting from webpage to webpage looking for which authors had written new stuff since I last looked! But, it had a few drawbacks:
Safari's RSS reader wants to be smarter than you about what you've already read, whether or not a given feed has had any content added since the last time you checked, and you can't properly search it for a given bit of text; and,
I still had to wait for lots of content to load from lots of different websites and get rendered into the single RSS feed, and some of those pages were slooooow. Since a good portion of my blog-reading time takes place on public transit, I wanted to be able to load the feed in a reasonable amount of time as the last thing I did before I walked out the door in a big rush.
I started checking out other RSS readers, and found many of them had similar issues, or new ones all their own. All I wanted from my aggregator was just that—an aggregate of the content from the feeds I follow, sorted with the newest stuff at the top, even if I've already read it, without too much extra clutter and without taking forever to load—and yet, I couldn't find anything that would just give that to me without also having sucky/annoying UI, or weird other performance problems, or being Mac-incompatible.
Finally, I happened upon Planet, a fairly no-frills aggregator for setting up web sites that are aggregates of other feeds. It does require a web server, so it's not necessarily going to be workable for everyone, but it works great for me and keeps the layout simple, stupid. I installed it as a separate subdomain on boywithmachine.net, and have it running as an hourly cronjob. So every hour, it goes and aggregates all the feeds I want to read. It has a simple config file interface, and best of all, it caches the results so I'm not waiting a bazillion years for all the various sites I want to read to serve up their RSS feeds: instead, I let the cronjob do that. Now, all I have to do to refresh my subway blog reading is open a single web page on my laptop just before I leave home or the office. Bonus: since it's just a web page, I can easily follow all my favourite blogs from any browser on any other computer in the world. Perfect!
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