Hongkie Town

I think I may have played with RSS a couple of years ago when I first got into reading blogs. But I found it difficult to set up and preferred looking at the "real" web sites. But a couple of years have passed and of course the technology has significantly advanced.

More importantly (for me), the number of blogs I view on a daily basis has exploded. I use Firefox and found that when opening groups of web pages in tabs, anything over 10 or 12 at a time tends to really slow things down. As a result, I have 7 groups of blogs totaling 66 different web sites that I look at daily. Cycling through all of this to find the ones that have been updated can be a slow and unrewarding process. What's even worse is at night, if I'm bored, going through the 4 "groups" of Asian blogs only to find that only 1 or 2 of the 38 I monitor has been updated is simply frustrating.

At one point I tried using the built-in RSS in Firefox but didn't like it. Tried using Thunderbird, Mozilla's email/rss reader on the Mac, but it still seemed to be missing something. Finally, following a recent poll on Download Squad on RSS Readers, I decided to take the winner for a spin. It's called Great News and I'm sold.

First of all, it's free. It's light, with no adware or spamware. It took me way under an hour to get all 66 blogs into there. Click on "add feed" and type in the URL, it will check the site and let you know if it's, um, rss-able and what options you've got. I then exported everything as an opml file so I can have the same settings at both home and office. It periodically goes out and checks everything on the list for updates, or I can click on an "Update All" button - and it checks 66 blogs in well under a minute, so that I can see at a glance what's been updated. And aside from blogs, other types of things are retrievable - haven't checked all the options here but one of the things preloaded is a search for all new pictures of dogs on Flickr - I changed that to make it a search for all new HK pics.

Of course, different blogs look different in Great News, depending upon whatever options the blog owner did or didn't set.

This blog, for example, you'll see full content (minus comments) including any photos. The other end of the spectrum is HKMacs, who is also on blogspot, where you only get the headline, no text. Shaky is somewhere in the middle, with just the first four lines of each post. (In cases like this, you can click on the headline and the full web page will appear in Great News just as it would on your browser.)

So the only thing I've "lost" is the ability to know if a particular post has comments, without first clicking on a link to view the piece in its "native environment" (for lack of a better term). In return, I'll save a ton of time each day cruising for new content and know almost instantly whenever one of the sites I follow has been updated.

I'm not clear on the differences between RSS 2.0 and Atom .3. Looking at this blog each way gives me the same image. Any comments from anyone?

For those of you (most of you?) for whom this is old news, well, I'm a bit behind the curve here. For those of you who are even further behind the curve than me, check this out.