On 'blogs And RSS Feeds © Niall Fleming 2005
I don't know, I'm not entirely convinced about this whole 'blogging business, sure it's nice to keep a diary of sorts, but do you really need to tell the world you 'nipped out to the corner shop for a pint of milk because you ran out this morning when you had your usual everyday bran cereal'. No of course not, it's a moot subject, no one cares.
Occasionally though you do get the odd intriguing one, such as 'The Letters Of Marque - Heidi Bond's blog of life as a weird Michigan law student'. Which I mostly found because I was seeing if anyone else had could to the same conclusion that I had about the latest Harry Potter book - The Half-Blood Prince.
I suppose it's quite fun to find the 'blog of a really old friend that you've been wondering 'What's he up to now?' about. In which case you visit his 'blog and see that he's doing rather well for himself, had a few rough relationships recently, and expanded into internet dating, which didn't turn out to be as good as the site promised; but i digress.
Occasionally you might find out by reading said 'blog that actually this person wasn't really your friend at all, all these years they were just pretending for the sake of another mutual friend. But then since you've not spoken to them for about 6 months anyway, it's easy enough to just be blasé about it and say 'sod it, I didn't like him all that much either'.
To bring this particular ramble onto the subject of RSS, 'blogs have news feeds! Usually in Atom or RSS format. I have been resisting bothering to find out what RSS was for a long while, I'd read a few brief explanations and frankly couldn't see the point.
'It turns out that...' -- I totally agree wth Douglas Adams when he says that he finds this phrase immensely useful, saves a whole lot of explaining about how you actually came to a point and just makes it!
Anyway...It turns out that actually RSS is quite a good thing, I subscribed to the feed on El Reg just to see how it worked, me having noticed a new feature in Opera 8, whereby sites with RSS feeds have a pretty orange RSS button in the address bar and clicking it subscribes you.
It's quite neat, and saves me having to remember to visit the site to check for new news, because it automagically checks for new messages on a certain schedule set by the feed.
Though I'm not entirely emanoured with this when applied to blogs, I do see why a lot of them have feeds. It is perhaps useful for the more interesting blogs, but for the more mundane personal blogs with little or no point to them, then it's just a novelty that will likely never be taken advantage of.