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On life without an RSS aggregator

NewsGator is an excellent RSS news aggregator. I came across it while it was still in beta, and I loved it as soon as I started using it. It acts as an extension to Microsoft Outlook. When it grabs the RSS feeds of your favourite web sites, it converts individual postings into Outlook email items, and files them in a folder of your choice. The net effect is exactly as if new postings from your favourite weblogs are being delivered to you by email. It is supremely nifty.

But I’m not using it any more.

It’s not because of the price. At $29, it is a very reasonably priced product, that is very good at what it does. If you use Outlook as your email client, you should definitely download it and make use of the 14-day free trial period. You’ll like it. Even if you don’t use Outlook, it might even be enough to make you switch. (I had been using Mozilla mail until January, and NewsGator was good enough to make me suffer through the hell of converting my email from Mozilla to Outlook so I could use it. Now that’s impressive.)

No, the reason I’ve stopped using RSS aggregators at all (at least for now), is that my blogging habits were getting out of hand. By the time I left for Boston last week, I had about 50 RSS feeds I was tracking. They ranged from low-volume (Joel Spolsky only posts a new article every other week or so) to the high (Scripting News and Boing Boing Blog both deliver a dozen or so new postings every day), with everything inbetween. And I was spending about two hours an evening reading them all.

What was taking so long was not the reading of the posts themselves, but following the links therein, tracking down associated material, maybe posting a comment or two, and wondering if I should re-broadcast any of the material here on my own blog.

So why was I doing this? Well, one of the reasons was because I could, and because it was easy. An RSS aggregator makes it really simple for you to track even far more than the 50 blogs I had on my radar. Just a couple of mouse clicks gives you a new news feed, and takes another two-minute bite out of your day. (Some people boast of tracking over a hundred blogs with their newsreader. Do they have jobs, or do they just devour news on a full-time basis?)

Another reason for reading lots of blogs is because of the whole blogging popularity contest thing. If you’ve gone to the effort of creating a blog, you probably want people to read what you’re writing. When I started this blog here on Sunpig, my intention was to use it as an on-line summary of what was going on in my life for friends and family. I’m rubbish at keeping in touch with people via letters, email and phone calls. A weblog would allow me to address all my friends at once, and be done with the whole personal interaction thing! (Have a look at my first posting from June 2000. It’s almost how I would have written a letter.)

But as weblogs have become more popular in general, I have been reading more of them, and I’ve been seeing how other people do things, like write stuff that is of interest to more than just one’s family and friends. Technical articles, political commentary, pop wisdom, and miscellaneous other punditry. Plenty of these other blogs have lots of readers. These readers comment on postings, and they mention them in their own blogs. It’s nice to have your own little community of folks who read your blog to find what’s up with you, but there is a large amount of kudos and egoboo to be had from seeing one of your postings mentioned on a popular blog.

Did I succumb to that? Yes.

People crave recognition and attention. Even the most reclusive and shy of us love (perhaps secretly) being noted and admired. It’s a basic human need.

And one of the best ways of gaining attention in the blogging community is to participate in that community. Today, that participation takes the form of writing comments on postings you find interesting, writing follow-up postings and sending trackback pings to the original blog, or mentioning other blogs in your own postings, and generating enough through traffic to leave an imprint on the other blog’s referer logs. You can also ping weblog notification services when you write something new, or hang out on blogging bulletin boards. You can even take out paid adverts to drive traffic to your site.

Writing timely, original, and informative content can help, but it’s not necessary. That may get you noticed and nicely indexed by search engines, and they may drive lots of traffic to you (Sunpig.com gets well over 600 hits via Google alone every week), but you probably won’t get much in the way of repeat blog business from that. You may get lots of interesting email from complete strangers, though, and that can be fun in its own right.

Getting noticed once is relatively easy. Getting onto the daypop front page, or high up in the Technorati link cosmos takes a lot of time and continuous effort. Being there would be cool! Lots of people reading your stuff! Name recognition! Fame, fortune, and babes wherever you go! But is it worth all the effort you have to put in to get there?

Back to RSS feeds…endless swathes of them. I don’t really think I was consuming lots of feeds just so I could take part in the whole blogging community, and so get myself noticed. (Maybe subconsciously, though…) I enjoyed reading the articles themselves, and the pages they led me to that I would otherwise never have visited. But most weblog postings are transient, bound to a time and a virtual place that has passed through its glory season before I can set foot there. It’s mostly fluff and filler. What isn’t fluff and filler I can look up on Google when I need it. And if I’m in the mood for some fluff to waste some time on, it’s easily found again.

While I was away in Boston over the weekend, I checked my email twice, and uploaded some photos and narrative–mainly to show Abi and Alex and my parents what we were doing. Not once did I miss my RSS updates from those dozens of blogs. When I got back home, the NewsGator beta software I’d been using had expired.

I uninstalled it, and I felt free.

I’m not going to stop posting here all of a sudden. I’m still going to use this weblog as a dumping ground for what’s going on in my life, random opinions, rants, and other random bloggage. But I’m doing this for myself, and all of my friends I’m too lazy to keep in regular email contact with. I’m not out to expand my readership, or to drive more traffic to this site. If that happens, fine. (Hi! Welcome!) But it’s really not what I’m about. After Alex goes to bed in the evenings, I have little enough personal time, and there are more interesting things I want to do with it, such as:

  • reading more books
  • getting back into drumming
  • writing some fiction again
  • doing some recreational coding
  • getting my Bob Shaw project off the ground

And hey, maybe getting to bed a little earlier in the evenings. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. And on that note….

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Boston wrap-up

Our last day in Boston, Monday, was one of the coldest days I can remember. The basic temperature was about -8C, with a wind chill that took another seven or eight degrees of that. It was beyond cold and well into actively painful.

Martin and Scott in front of the Massachusetts State House We didn’t end up doing much. We had a breakfast of donuts, and then hopped from shop to shop in Downtown Crossing, trying to stay just slightly warm. In an attempt to show that we’re not completely dead to history and culture, we also did a tour of the Massachusetts State House. We finished our time in the city with a late lunch at Quincy Market, and a beer at the “Cheers” bar there.

Overall, we had a great time. Boston is a lovely city. With its narrow streets and brick facades it feels European in places. The shopping is pretty good, even in the shops are almost the same as everywhere else: Gap, Clare’s Accessories, Borders, Macys, Banana Republic, etc. That struck me as soon as we arrived there. Globalisation is smoothing out the worldwide retail experience. I don’t think this is a good thing. I like going places and being able to find stuff I can’t get anywhere else. Sure, the market stalls in Quincy and Faneuil Hall sell localised merchandise, but you know you’ll be able to find t-shirts, sweaters, baseball caps, cheap jewelry and miscellaneous other souvenir goods. It’s not the same. (Rome, on the other hand, is completely different. One of the many reasons we love it so much.)

The pubs in Boston are really nice. We visited four, and they were all friendly and atmospheric. The beer is really expensive, though. On Saturday afternoon we paid $12.50 for a pint of Guinness and a pint of Sam Adams. Admittedly, this was in a tourist-friendly pub just round the corner from Faneuil Hall, but the prices elsewhere weren’t too far off this, either. And, as we found out on Sunday on our way back to the hotel (soaking wet from the pouring rain), you can’t buy beer on a Sunday. We’d hoped to take in a couple of brewskis and watch the golf, but we ended up with Diet Coke instead. We did go out to a smashing bar (The Marshall House) later in the evening for a meal. I had lobster–yum!

So, was the trip worth it? Definitely yes. Would I do it again? Hmm. I really missed Abi and Alex. But if I could have them with me, then I’d be well up for a return visit.

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Boston, part 2

Martin with the River Charles in the backgroundYay! I’ve got my luggage back! It arived this morning. Unfortunately it wasn’t here in time for the Toad concert last night, so I was forced to buy some new clothes yesterday afternoon (trousers, t-shirt, sweater, socks), and let my travel insurance pick up the tab. Damn.

Scott with Faneuil Hall in the backgroundThe concert was excellent. On the Glen Phillips message board, a few folks were complaining that the venue and the crowd were rubbish, but I thought it rocked. (Perhaps having flown five thousand miles to get here has something to do with that? Maybe.)

Martin with the F.A.O. Schwartz bearWe did have a scary moment before the gig, though. After we’d walked all over the landscape and located the Avalon (right next to Fenway Park), we took the subway (the “T”) back to downtown. We split up to do some shopping, and met back at the hotel. The idea was that we’d rest up for a bit, then head out at about 6 or 6:30, and have something to eat near the venue before actually going in at 8.

At about five minutes to six, with both of us slobbed out on our beds, watching the World Matchplay Championship golf on TV, I pulled the concert tickets out of my bag to have a look at them.

“Er, Scott…”

“Hmm?”

“It says here that the concert starts at 6:30. And that the doors opened at 5:30.”

“Shit!”

Martin and Scott on the TA mad dash ensued. We got changed in no time flat, and were out the door by 5 past 6. Fortunately Boston is quite small. The T station was only a couple of blocks from our hotel, and it was only a 15 minute trip on the train to get to the stop closest to the Avalon. We knew that Toad wouldn’t be on stage at 6:30, but I do like catching opening acts, and I had a dread worry that they might not let us in if we arrived late.

Boston in the rainAll was cool, though. We got there at dead on 6:30, and there were plenty of people who arrived even later. Wheat had already started playing, but we took the time to stow our coats and have a beer. We then wandered through to the main hall, and enjoyed the music.

Wheat were pretty good, but Bleu absolutely rocked. They both played about five or six songs, followed by half hour breaks for breaking down and setting up again. Toad came on at around 8:30, and the crowd went wild. They played eighteen songs, followed by two encores:

  1. Whatever I fear
  2. Something’s always wrong
  3. Dam would break
  4. The longest day
  5. Fly from heaven
  6. Crowing
  7. All I want
  8. Always changing probably (? I’ve never been too sure about the titles from Bread and Circus
  9. Come back down
  10. Nightingale song
  11. Political Science (Randy Newman song, Glen acoustic)
  12. ? (Another Glen acoustic song, but I didn’t recognise it)
  13. See you again (A Lapdog song. Johnny Hawthorne accompanied them on a lot of the material this evening, but he stayed at the back of the stage. They let him up front on this one, and he rocked some electric guitar ass.)
  14. Windmills
  15. ? (A new Toad song? “Everybody’s Cool”? Glen chewed the mike and mumbled most of the way through it, so I didn’t catch most of the lyrics.)
  16. Hold her down
  17. Brother
  18. Fall down
  1. Crazy Life
  2. Amnesia
  3. Walk on the Ocean
  1. I will not take these things for granted

Toad the Wet Sprocket at the Avalon Ballroom, 1 March 2003Man, oh man, that was fantastic. Despite the camera ban, I managed to snap a few pictures. (I didn’t want to use a flash, though, so they’ve come out a bit blurry.) On our way back to the hotel we were feeling a bit peckish, so we stopped to grab a couple of chicken and pepper sandwiches just outside Quincy Market. It was after-pub food, but it just hit the spot for us. Lovely.

Martin at the Prudential CenterToday we had breakfast in the hotel, and went out to do a bit of shopping. After yesterday’s cold, crisp, but sunny weather, today is utter rubbish. It’s pissing down with rain, and despite the hotel’s complimentary umbrella, we’re both soaked to the skin. We’ve just had a slice of apple cinnamon loaf at the Prudential arcade, but now we’re probably going to head back to the hotel. Plan is to pick up some beers on the way, and watch the rest of the final of the golf. If it’s not too rainy this evening, we might go out and catch a movie. Otherwise, it’ll be just up to Quincy for some delicious deep-fried Chinese food. Yum!

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Boston!

Martin in BostonYay! We’re in Boston!

Without my luggage!

I had almost been expecting it to go missing, so it wasn’t too great a surprise (or stressful situation) when we got to the baggage caroussel, and the NorthWest customer rep announced that about a hundred passengers’ bags had been left in Amsterdam. So that’s three times in four years.

Boston Common, with snowIt’s very cold here. There was lots of snow, and a severly hard frost earlier in the week, and most of it is still around. It’s piled up on the sides of the streets and lumped around trees. The ponds of Boston Common are still frozen over, and the whole city looks very pretty.

Scott in BostonWe’re having a good time so far. Yesterday evening after we’d checked in at the hotel, we went out for a wander around town to get the lay of the land, and have a beer. This morning we walked all over the landscape looking for someplace that would serve us pancakes for breakfast. At about 11 o’clock we gave up and had omelettes and muffins instead. (No diners! Everything is trying to be continental European-style!)

Boston snowToad this evening. We’re planning to walk out to the concert venue now and scope it out, to see is there’s anyplace nearby we can have something to eat before the gig. We’ll probably head back to our hotel in the afternoon, then take the subway there in the evening. Yay!

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Anxious before the trip

Only seven hours or so before I set off to Boston. I wish I were more excited, but right now it hardly seems real. America, planes, Toad… All I’m feeling now is anxiety, and anticipation of how much I’m going to miss Abi and Alex. I love you, guys.