Keith Devens .com

Bloglines clipblog

I've been using Bloglines as my RSS aggregator and I'm largely happy with it. It works mostly "the right way" for an aggregator to work (i.e. not like an e-mail client), and it's great to have stuff come to me rather than me having to go to it. It's a shame everything looks the same -- I miss not seeing everyone's individual layout -- but that's the price you pay.

I've created a "clipblog" at Bloglines at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/Keith83. Previously I've had two options when I wanted to save something I saw in my aggregator, usually in order to read later because I'm not home at the time. I could either keep the item as new in Bloglines' aggregator (but that sucks, since the feed grabs your attention by claiming new items even though you've seen them all before), or I could send myself an e-mail with a bunch of URLs in it. With the latter, I often wouldn't go through the e-mail, and since it was just a list of bare URLs there was no way to tell what things were without visiting everything. The e-mails often sit in Thunderbird and stay unread. If there was a way to edit the message to delete the links I've subsequently read I'd be better off, but there's not. Also, I'd often wind up sending myself a bunch of e-mails as I came across new links I wanted to save, so it's just a mess.

In addition to those two, I'd sometimes revive my del.icio.us account, but I wouldn't use the tagging so I wasn't really using it how it was meant to be used, and it's also another account to have to log into. Plus, if I wanted to write anything I'd be limited to 255 characters. Bloglines clipblog feature doesn't have any of these problems for me. Ironically, I'm subscribed to del.icio.us/popular and I was spurred to create the clipblog when I wanted to keep track of a lot of those links.

So, feel free to visit the clipblog if you'd like. Much of the stuff there probably won't ever make it to my real blog (then again, maybe I'll just syndicate it on my blog once a day), but some of it will. Keep in mind that most of the stuff there I likely haven't read yet, and anything I read and then like will probably wind up on my blog anyway.

Hmm... I wish it automatically put the title of a weblog at the start of a link you blog straight from Bloglines instead of only the post title. And I really wish it had Javascript to automatically close the posting window after you post something.

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19:30 (utc-5)
edited: 19:41 (utc-5)