::A Geek in Korea::

The Firefox Google Reader Notification add on lets me in on when my feeds are being updated. It’s been sitting at zero all day today, so I thought that there may have been a problem. I aggregate my RSS feeds with Google Reader. Today there was a widespread Google Reader Outage. I was affected from the outage and left pondering what to do lacking my daily updates. I need my feeds.

I’ve been checking websites with syndication far longer than the average blogger. Back when I was big into litestep customization, I used to check dozens of sites for the latests updates, themes, and widgets. I was around in the RDF days when sites had to bend over backwards to offer syndication, and there were only a few aggregating tools around. I was there, blogging in the winter with frozen digits, walking ten hours to post a nugget of news, and I liked it!

I knew a good thing when I saw it and wasn’t surprised when eventually people caught on to using RSS on everything. Now it’s just something required for me to even consider keeping up with someone’s work.

It’s grown from a hobby worthy convenience into something huge. I don’t check those old feed anymore, but I use my RSS feeds more than ever. I keep track of fifty or more feeds, and I add and remove sites depending on their content and updates. Having a good feed promptly updated will keep me returning to your site.

I can fire up my computer and check to see everything that has been written since I last checked, easily, in one place, quickly. When I read something, I can revisit it in detail, search for it later, or keep it in a special place to share with friends if I so choose. As far as rapidly increasing the amount of information I process to keep up with things I find interesting, it’s must.

After my last vacation, my feed had swollen to over 600+ posts. If I go over a day without checking, I’ll end up with hundreds of things waiting for my attention. Most of it is trivial stuff that I don’t need to actually read. A political site I check updates once or more every hour, and I don’t do much more than scan a headline to see if it is the most current for the topic before I move on. I still like to keep my waiting queue down to zero, and sometimes I can go for an hour or more reading really interesting news.
I still have some RSS holdouts that haven’t set up their own feed readers. I’ve converted one friend, and am working on one more. I’m fighting my addiction to surf perpetually (a habit easily formed with you get enough RSS feeds waiting) by using the TimeTracker Firefox extension. It lists the time I am spending surfing at any site other than my own, or any sites I define as an exception. It’s already helping me get my RSS habit back under control.