Vincent Oberle’s blog
The fun of webfeeds
In the link menu of my web site has appeared a new section called blogroll. It is a nice little consequence of a new way I read web sites: I use webfeeds.
For an introduction on webfeeds see here. In short, a webfeed is a way for a web site to continuously “feed” you announcements of their latest content. Concretely, it is a file on the site that lists the latest content and that is regularly pulled by your webfeed program.
To read webfeeds, you can use a desktop program. RSS Bandit is one on Windows. Firefox also has a webfeed reader as an extension. I started to use a plugin to Outlook that made feeds look like email. It’s a nice program, but at some point it made Outlook unstable, so I looked for something else. I tried a standalone client software, RSS Bandit, but it was a pain to reconfigure the proxy settings between work and home (I use the same laptop at work and at home). Plus I didn’t like having another application all the time open.
Then I fall on Bloglines, which is a web site that offers a webfeed reader online. It’s really great. The interface is simple and fast. It allows staying in Firefox, which is nice because Firefox is very comfortable to use. Also, standalone readers generally use Internet Explorer for rendering HTML, which I prefer to avoid knowing the security problems of IE.
Bloglines has other great features. It can publish the list of feeds in your own web site - a blogroll - as I do here. It is also possible to make some part of your feed public for other people to see what you are reading, see my one here. It is a good way to try out Bloglines interface.
And the best is that you can subscribe to mailing-lists from Bloglines, the mails will then be sent to Bloglines and be shown as feeds, a great way to lighten the burden on your inbox.
Webfeeds allow me to read more interesting stuff in less time, no a small thing in today’s world.
