RSS

RSS feed angst, part deux

/ laterain / 1 Comment

I thought I’d solved this . . . but the “new” computer (my “flea market” laptop) actually doesn’t have IE installed yet, so I can’t even get back to using the IE feed . . .

But here’s the thing . . . I’ve tried the Firefox plug-ins . . . I’ve tried using my Yahoo page . . . heaven help me, I’ve actually tried to use Google Reader! 

And I HATE. THEM. ALL.

I want my feeds the way IE does them . . . all lined up in a pretty little row, titles only, and highlighted if there’s new stuff I need to read.

I don’t want to see a snippet of every flippin’ article (over a hundred, remember?) every time I sign on.

I don’t want to have to navigate back and forth to another page when I need to get back to my list. I want to be able to just click on that handy little sidebar and go from there.

I know that I have way too many feeds . . . and I will pare them down, I promise! But there are too many that I truly DO want to read that are falling by the wayside. Do you know how long it’s going to take me to catch up on this guy’s blog? or this? or this? or this? Seriously, this is my tivo . . . and I’m severely compromised without it.

so for now, do I go back to reading blogs on the dinosaur desktop computer in the red room, and doing everything else while lounging in bed, using the laptop?

If you hate the new Facebook layout (then you should’ve started sooner! just kidding), then you may have a tiny smidgen of understanding of how VERY much I hate this. and my own advice to others vis-a-vis FB doesn’t apply here . . . I don’t WANT to “just get used to it”.

(wah, wah, wah. anybody got some cheese to go with this whine?!)

R.I.P. Firefox

/ laterain / 1 Comment

Just to prove that I absolutely DO need a new computer . . . my Firefox stopped working randomly. AND my WordPress STARTED working again . . . so I’m a wimp, and I’m back to IE.

The only sucky thing is . . . because I deleted Firefox from my computer (it wasn’t working, right? so I figured I might as well), all of the feeds I moved to that browser (and subsequently deleted from IE) are now gone.

I’m such a dork.

But maybe this is a good thing . . . maybe it’s time to do some virtual “spring cleaning” and weed out my feeds one more time . . . My absolute favorites will be ones that I’ll continue to seek out, and maybe I can get rid of some of the excess. maybe . . . Continue reading →

I feel better now . . .

/ laterain / 1 Comment

(yeah . . . better than I’ll feel at 7am when I’m trying to wake up for work!!!)

So I did some more digging, on the advice of a wise friend, and as it turns out, I did find a plug-in that I like well enough to use with Firefox . . . even if it does make me think about going to the bathroom every time I look at the name of it!

I’ve gotten about 40 or 50 of my RSS feeds onto the page, and although I don’t care so much for the order they’re in, I like the way it’s set up, and in some minor ways, it’s almost easier than my previous set-up.

so I feel better now . . . relieved, as if all is now right with the world. hmm. is that a sign of blogaholism?!

In other news . . . I attended an AMAZING discussion/lecture this afternoon . . . and the speaker really blew away some of my paradigms–not at all about race, actually, but about writing, and blogging, and whether the two really are the same thing . . . so I’ll have more to say about that soon, but needless to say, my tenth annual midlife crisis is rearing its head again . . .

however, I will be having an UNEMPLOYED crisis if I don’t go to sleep RIGHT NOW, so more later.

RSS feed angst

/ laterain / 4 Comments

So never mind that I got more comments than I ever got in my whole life from friends of mine telling me that of COURSE I should have been using Firefox ages ago . . . (thanks for never telling me anything important!!!)

And never mind the fact that I am happily blogging again . . . (as if you hadn’t noticed?!)

Seriously. I have a new problem! Don’t you feel sorry for me?! (and even if you don’t, now that I know that you HAVE THE ANSWERS TO ALL OF MY WOES, I’m confident that one of you will have a solution for this one . . . )

The one thing I REALLY liked about Internet Explorer 7 was that I could subscribe to RSS feeds quite easily, and could just monitor them from a sidebar that I could show or hide at will. Well, I’ve tried two or three different things with Firefox so far, and I don’t really like any of them. I had tried the IGoogle thing (I know some of you swear by it–or WOULD swear by it if you weren’t good little Reformed girls!–but I just don’t care for it) and now I am working from an additional “page” on my yahoo that allows me to list a bunch of feeds–but the set-up feels cumbersome to me, and I miss the ease of flipping through my RSS feeds with ease, and of not having to backtrack to a centralized page, then scroll through said page, to get to the posts I want to read . . .

Part of the problem is that I definitely have FAR too many feeds that I’m subscribed to. (I always think about something I read–on a blog, I’m sure–about how if you spend too much time reading other people’s blogs, you don’t leave yourself enough time to write your own–I think that’s probably applicable far beyond blogging . . . ) But it’s hard . . . because although I try to prune out some of them on occasion, most of the blogs I read on a regular basis are ones that I’ve become quite fond of. From the single foster mom who I’ve been reading so long that I feel like she’s a friend now, to “IRL” friends that I need to keep up with, there is just so much to read . . . so yes, I need to prune, but what I really need is a better way to get to my ever-growing collection of “must-read” blogs.

any suggestions? (other than “get a life”–thanks–I did try that once!)

ps–seriously–to paraphrase Forrest Gump–you’ve got your Reformed blogs, your black folks’ blogs, your black Reformed folks blogs, your fat chick blogs, your coolest-fat-teenager-EVER blogs (okay, that ones’s one of a kind!), your education blogs, your grammar police blogs, your anti-racism blogs, your loldog blogs, all of those “overheard” blogs, there are lots of those, fried blogs, blog soup, blogs on the half shell . . .

(you get the idea . . . seriously, I keep thinking of categories I’ve missed, but probably nobody is still reading at this point anyway . . . )