August 3, 2003 spout

No huggy, no kissy, until I get an RSS feed

Before RSS took over, I had a folder named Daily” which had links to all of the URLs that I surfed to on a daily basis. One problem was that for the sites that changed daily, it was a pain to decide what was new. An even bigger problem was the ones that didn’t change daily. Eventually, the pain of surfing to them daily was outweighed by the pleasure I would get when those sites were finally updated. A bunch of my friends’ infrequently updated blogs fall into this category (you know who you are : ).

Sure, RSS is useful to track Scoble as he shirks his moving duties, but even more useful to track Tim when he eventually does update his blog. With RSS, I don’t have to experience any pain surfing to Tim’s blog day after day. Instead, I let SharpReader poll Tim’s blog and when it’s finally updated, I’ll know about it. All gain; no pain.

What that means, unfortunately, is that I only read blogs with RSS feeds, because I’ve long ago gotten out of the habit of surfing my Daily” folder. So when Josh Trupin (editor of MSDN Magazine) gave his reasons for being out of the office on Monday, he had to send me an email with a link to the description of his horrific train injury detailed on his blog. As fun a writer as Josh is, I won’t go back (unless Google brings me there) til he’s got an RSS feed. I’ve been hurt before; now I’m older and wiser and require an RSS feed before I’m willing to wed myself to a blog.