An Ode to the Syndicated Lifestyle
Last month I talked about how I moved most of my bookmarks in my browser onto del.icio.us with the help of Pukka. I enjoy the flexibility that web services such as del.icio.us afford - letting me store part of my digital persona online. Tonight I completed my transition by replacing 40 or so bookmarks with their respective feeds in my current aggregator, NewsFire. I am left with only the essential ~20 bookmarks in my browser. It makes me feel one step closer to not having a browser at all. I know it has been said before, but RSS is great.
Bookmarks (not permalinks) are being phased out by RSS. No longer do I need to maintain 300 miscellaneous bookmarks that clutter my browser. I can throw those really random ones to del.icio.us, keep the daily-reads and private bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar and direct the rest to an aggregator. Feeds have really changed the way that I browse in the past year that I have passionately been using RSS wherever it is to be found. However, I am not the type of person to read entire posts in my aggregator. If something catches my eye, I will be opening it in a browser.
Okay enough with my spiel, the whole point of this post was to serve up some hot OPML, mine. For those that setup camp outside of the loop, OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is the XML format for an outline. It is the standard and preferred format for importing and exporting a collection of feeds. If you are an aggregator-bearing reader, feel free to import my OPML. Be warned though, there are about 150 feeds (recently trimmed down from 500) so it might take a while to load. Unfortunately, NewsFire does not like exporting the group names so you will just be getting a bunch of unorganized feeds. If you have similar interests as me, you might find these tech-centric feeds useful.
So you say you subscribe to 674 feeds? Interesting. Feel free to list your favorites below. I love finding out about new (tech) sites. If you have any OPMLs to share, please link us up Scotty.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still enjoy loading up a bookmark in my browser and looking directly at my favourite sites. I’ve rarely used RSS, despite being subscribed to many a feed.
Paul, man I agree with you on this one definitely. RSS has flipped around how i do things on the web now, including tracking code bugs. I think I found a bug inside of some software that I use and instead of bouncing to the forum where i submitted it everyday, i just subscribed to the threads RSS feed. Now when someone comments, it shows up in NetNewsWire. Awesome!!!
Word Stammy, RSS is the shit.
Brian, how can you subscribe to many feeds without using RSS?
RSS is the way forward. Newshutch holds my feeds, so wherever I happn to be I can get at them. I still have to have a few bookmarks, for things without feeds. Most notably webcomics
I’m with you Paul. If its an RSS feed it goes to NewsFire every time. I generally find myself hitting the highlights from my favorite sites while getting my coffee in the AM and then browse through the headlines until something interests me at night.
I am however starting to wonder if there is a “need” developing in the market place to parse through *so much* information. The amount of time it takes to simply browse through 600 feeds is a bit ridiculous. Is there a better way? Hmmm.
NetNewsWire Lite is my weapon of choice for RSS. Its simple design lets me browse my 500 or so articles that I come home to each day very cleanly and without using a mouse which is a huge plus.
Although NewsFire is getting a lot of press lately but I don’t know if I can make the switch, I really enjoy NNW.
I still can’t pull away from bloglines for some reason. I check out feed sites as I hear of them (mostly from this blog), but while they are all web-2.0-cool, the loose some of the simplicity frame-based bloglines has.
I think NPR is my latest great find, podcasts of all the shows. Perfect for lunch time at work. My OPML http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=scoregasm
I too enjoy RSS a bit too much. As it has with you, RSS has totally changed the way I “browse” the Web. I also opted for an application based RSS reader simply because I like the separation. I’m running Liferea on Linux and it’s been my best RSS experience thus far. Thanks for sharing your OPML — I’ll have to check it out as soon as I have a spare minute.
I subscribe to well over 100 feeds so RSS is a must (I use NetNewsWire). However, I do tend to click on the link in NNW to read the content on the actual site.
I wonder how much effect RSS has had on a website’s ability to generate income from ads. Since less people visit the site and RSS ads aren’t as popular, how are they making money?
“Since less people visit the site and RSS ads aren’t as popular, how are they making money?”
I think that sites that have good content to contribute to the web still get site traffic despite RSS.
Whoa, I’m honored to be in “the list”, Paul. Nice set of blogs. I used to do the 500+ feed thing too but there’s just too much ‘noise’ when you do it that way. Now we just need RSS to be a bit (lot) more everyonelese-friendly and RSS will become a household name just like ‘blog’… tongue-in-cheek.
Josue: I HAVE a reader, I just rarely end up using it. ;-)
Then again, I think I probably read less sites on a daily basis than many others. I still jump around checking out new sites, but I only have maybe 10 regular, daily-reads or so.
My main problem has really been finding the right sites and finding a good reader. With sites, yeah, I can get just about any site I want with RSS feeds, but I rather have one good feed on a topic than 7 with too much information. For instance, I would rather joystiq.com’s feed to kotaku/com’s feed because Kotaku just updates way too much. This is the same reason I dislike Engadget, there is just too much information, even for me. Then is the issue of sites not giving feel feeds, I just hate that. I really, really dislike that and I am looking at you Kotaku. Thanks for sharing your OPML file, have you ever tried http://share.opml.org/ before, Paul?
I don’t trust online services and all my data I store on my own hdd. The only thing I need is program, what will trasmit bookmarks between browsers
I use del.icio.us mainly for its social aspect, to let others know what I’ve been browsing. However I still prefer having my bookmarks local and within easy reach. Having them on del.icio.us means access is contingent on their server being available, although I have to admit their reliability has improved tremendously since being acquired by Yahoo!. As for RSS, I tend to read short articles and links in NewsFire and launch longer ones to read in Safari.
I worship Bloglines! Seriously this is the best feed reader I have ever found. I just could not live without it. I have tried few others like Google Reader… but I find Bloglines way superior.
BTW this is my OPML (about 100 feeds)
http://bloglines.com/public/guillaumeb
outphased? Is this like phased out?
I am still sticking the way it used to be..but yeah why not give a try.:D
Whoa. Did I not type that right?
Now this should link correctly:
julianbh.com/feeds.opml
http://www.almosteffortless.com/files/feeds.opml
I don’t know about you Paul, but it annoys me when websites have RSS feeds, but it just includes the headlines… or a preview of the full article. I want the feed to have the whole post- images and all. So thanks for making your own feed full, I just wish other people would as well.
Inspired by you, I have now almost totally eliminated my browser bookmarks.
I’ve moved everything to del.icio.us, except a “daily sites” bookmark folder that auto-tabs (basically for all the sites I read that don’t have RSS), and a few pages I need to get to many many times per day, and are hard to type.
Thanks. This is awesome.