Thursday, April 2, 2009

Feed Burner or Custard the Dragon?

For the first time in a very long time we went on a realio, trulio [with apologies to Ogden Nash and Custard the Dragon, whose poem I memorized and recited in sixth grade and the tag line of which remains with me even though it is lo, these many years later] vacation! My boys and I spent a week in sunny, breezy, lovely, palm tree-, alligator-, and vulture-filled southern Florida. We had a wonderful time except for one thing - three of us, zero computers!

On our return home I was very much behind schedule with my two online classes. I was particularly grateful for the earlier class assignment that had required me to set up a Google Reader account. It was such a welcome treat to have just one place to go to check on new news and blog entries.

I'd made a half-hearted attempt at setting up a Feed Demon account some months ago, but I never could remember to look at it, so half-hearted is what it remained. I'm very much a creature of habit and I was quite content with the six blogs I'd put on my Blogspot blog list. It was rare that any of them posted more often than once every two or three days and I could comfortably keep pace.

I have to admit that I've gone a bit overboard with my Google Reader subscriptions. It's a bit off-putting to open the page and find 100 new posts here and 320 new posts there. I think a bit of house-keeping is in order to reduce things to a slightly more manageable level of activity.

But it sure is a lot of fun!

1 comment:

Jeff said...

Learning to manage your RSS reader does take some time. I know the feeling. I opened up mine today and found I have 425 things that need to be "read". Will I read them all? Nope...but they are there if I need them.

Just because things say they need to be read doesn't mean they need to be. Feel free to browse like you would a newspaper. Delete things you find that you continually skip over and add things that you continually find yourself clicking on and going to. Understanding that an RSS reader is fluid and never stable takes time. You are never done tweaking, and playing with your subscriptions...and that's a good thing. :)