Subscribing to RSS Theory

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen that’s full of rubber bands, pens, take-out menus, birthday candles, miscellaneous kitchen utensils, string, magnets and all sorts of other junk? That, to me, is what my RSS reader feels like. No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending chunks of time here and there trying to clean out the drawer, so to speak, organizing the many, many feeds that I’ve haphazardly stashed inside various folders and subfolders within NetNewsWire. My goal has been to group them into some sort of hierarchy that will allow me to make better use of them, to cluster them together logically. Not necessarily by content type, but rather in use-oriented ways, like how often they’re published or how often I tend to read them.

The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me. I acknowledge that some customization is often — if not always — necessary to get the most efficient use out of any given software. But moreso than with most classes of software, it’s my feeling that RSS readers shortchange users with only half of the features we need to get the job done.

Continue Reading …

+

My Time Away from Blogging

For like two weeks I’ve been tinkering with a draft of a new blog post, but I can’t seem to get it done. As time goes by, I get more and more skeptical of whether or not I can bang it into good enough shape to somehow qualify as a sufficiently worthy ‘comeback post.’ To plausibly excuse my little hiatus away from blogging, I feel compelled to return to the fray with nothing less than a screed that’s somehow good enough. Whatever that means, I haven’t quite got it, I know.

Not to say that I’m taking all of this so seriously. In fact, I think I’m taking this weblog less seriously than I have before. I admit sheepishly that there was a time, a few years ago, when blogging was one of the most important things in any given day of my life. And sometimes, often enough to be regrettable, it disproportionately dominated my priorities when it really shouldn’t have.

So there are a lot of reasons I’m not blogging right now with quite the alacrity that I have in the past. My day job is busier than ever at the moment, seemingly (and piled on, this week anyway, with extracurricular questions and answers). The weather’s turned nice in New York, too. Finally there’s daylight when I climb out of the subway from my evening commute, and I can wear a tee-shirt to walk Mister President even when the thermometer hits the day’s lows — which I would rather do than sitting in front of my computer. Also, I finally realized: living life is more important than blogging about design.

Continue Reading …

+