Several small notes about various friends who keep blogs:
Since I began using RSS feeds to keep up on all the blogs I read, I’d lost track of several people who, for one reason or another, either didn’t have an RSS feed or whose feed didn’t work. I almost never visit anyone’s blog “in person” anymore, so not having a working RSS feed is equivalent to being “off the grid” as far as my attention goes.
Quite honestly, while using RSS feeds does make the business of keeping up with blogs vastly more efficient, there are aspects of using the feeds that I don’t like, and this is probably the biggest one. And, while I know there’s nothing preventing me from visiting those feed-free sites, the reality of the situation is that once you get going with several dozen feeds to keep up with on a daily basis, it seriously disincents one from visiting blogs. That’s too bad, really, because back in the olden days (three or four years ago) part of the entire experience of blogging was this visiting function. It gave you creative inspiration when you saw someone’s cool new design, and it encouraged commenting and counter-commenting.
Anyway, I was happy to discover that Karan finally got her feeds working again. Her feed is “title-only”, which actually does force you to go visit the site if you want to read the post, so maybe that’s the happy compromise — you know someone is posting, but you have to go pay a visit.
And somewhere along the line, Sue added an RSS feed. She had deliberately turned feeds off a while back when she discovered that someone was scraping them and posting them on another blog without her permission. Then, I guess, she actually stopped blogging for a while, and I lost all track of her. I am always tickled when a post from her pops up in my feed reader.
Meanwhile, Tony has moved beyond the blogging backwater of Microsoft LiveSpaces with a new blog. It never ceases to amaze me how half-assedly Microsoft approached the whole blog business. Tony’s ulterior motive for moving stems from Microsoft’s insistence that anyone wishing to comment on a LiveSpace blog be registered with their “LiveID” service, which is the latest incarnation of their equally horrible “.NET Passport” scheme. We’ve all got a little too much Big Brother in our lives right now to play along with Uncle Bill’s Total Global Domination game, don’t you think? Especially for something as trivial as blog comments. Hopefully, leaving LiveSpaces behind will not only get him to post a little bit more, but it will encourage a few more people to say something back once in a while.
And indeed I had lost track of you since your feed was no longer appearing in my tracker.
Off to correct that now. And who knew about Sue? I have her in my list of daily reeds where i actually had to click through and visit since she hadn’t had a feed.
Yes, when I changed over from Movable Type to WordPress last month, the feed URL changed.
Sorry about that.
Speaking of which, the feed for “Amuse Bouche” isn’t always consistent, but I can’t tell for sure if it’s your blog software or Google Reader that’s the underlying culprit.
I didn’t do anything to make my feed start working again and title only? Weird. Go figure. Sue is blogging again. You have her URL correct but you might need to reset your rss feed because I think she’s changed it a couple of times.
I’m glad to have you back!