Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.
Something very interesting just swam into view. I discovered RSS Feeds.
The more tech-savvy amongst you are probably already aware of this, but to me it was something of a revelation (and not the kind of revelation with seven-headed beasts, neither).
The thing that appears to be the case, is that you can have an "RSS Feed" aggregator that looks and behaves much like one of those live news feeds that we market types all stare at for the five minutes before each major data release (then we try and make the damned thing keep still so we can read the headline as all the data spews out).
It means you don't have to "navigate" to a site to see if it's changed, for example. Your aggregator "monitors" your list of sites and tells you if one of your faves has changed (so long as your fave has an RSS feed).
I've just downloaded Pluck, which includes a free RSS reader as well as a whole bunch of other things. Its RSS Reader is pretty neat and comes pre-packaged with a load of RSS Feeds that you will probably want to delete immediately - and you'll obviously want to add at least one - namely
That's the Atom/RSS feed for my blatherings.
Once you've set it up, Pluck tells you when any of your favourite RSS-enabled sites is updated - the "look" of the RSS reader is like the Reuters or Dow Jones newswires, but you can customise it to ensure that the quality is far higher than either of those bunches of duds.
For me, it enables very quick checks of whether or not my fave sites have anything on them that I haven't read yet. I've had it installed for an hour and I'm a convert.
The one downside to the RSS version of things, is that is appears to screw up the Google ads within the page - that is, if you use Pluck to find out that I've just posted something worth reading, and you click on the Pluck link to get to the Rant, the ads aren't there (or are replaced by graphical ads or something).
No matter - I am far more enthused about RSS than I am about getting little bits of money from Google Adsense.
