Behind the times

I love blogs. Good ones, anyway. I like the medium and I appreciate the way a well written blog can broaden your perspective on the world and give you a sneak peek into things that are important to others.

I have a number of blogs that I check on a daily basis. some of which I've linked to over on the side there
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In a number of these blogs I've heard reference to this mysterious thing called an RSS Feed. Not knowing what this was, I think I somehow created a picture in my mind of what this mysterious RSS feed thing might be*. In my head, it was something like a leader board like those they use in newsrooms and share dealing rooms with all the new stuff scrolling along around the room in letters made from red dots. Somehow I had myself convinced that RSS was something similar on my PC. This didn't really sound all that exciting to me. And since I usually check all these blogs from work, and I don't have access to install anything on my PC (even if it were working).

So, maintaining an impressive balance of both denial and delusion, I have continued checking blogs individually.

Until yesterday.

I finally got out of my own head long enough to find out what this was all about. Needless to say there's no scrolling of anything and no software download requirements. Pretty much nothing at all like anything I thought.

So if, like me, you have never thought to check out RSS feeds, I would urge you to do so immediately. Maybe here at Bloglines. It's a really excellent thing where you just put in the web address of all your favourite blogs and it give you a list and tells you if there have been any updates. You just click on each out of the list and that particular blog is available in a panel to the left. Couldn't be easier and it stops me checking my stack of regular pages every day, whether they've been updated or not. And they're all in the one place.

Couldn't be easier. Seriously. Maybe I should have checked it out earlier.


*In a somewhat similar fashion to the way I create directions for myself when driving, think I know where I'm going, and then get myself horribly lost.