Friday, November 07, 2003

Reading news, easing guilt The aggregator mailer feature in Radio has been changing the way I get my RSS blog news. Now, when I'm at work, I get a message *every hour, mind you*, containing around 10 headlines from one or more weblogs. In some ways, I find a single email more managable then the news reader page with *gobs* of items. It's got my posting juices flowing again. I don't feel quite so out of the habit. I don't know how Radio decides what to package up to send to me. There's some relationship between the aggregator's polling period and the frequency of email. A couple of things bug me though: - The sites and/or feeds that the links come from do not appear as links themselves. This is bogus. I need to know what the link is to the site so I can cite the source. Bloggers who use a link as the opening to a post do one of two things: link to the post itself (like a permalink) or link to the topic referenced. Well, either way, there's not a convenient way to generally reference the source (i.e. their blog). I can always slice the URL down to the domain, but what if they tuck their blog in some sub part of their site. Anyway... - Every hour is a bit much. Especially since I'm at work for *less than every hour of the day*. When I get to work, I see a message at 12:57 AM, 1:57 AM, 2:57 AM, 3:57 AM, etc. I don't know if my network adminstrator pays much attention, but... - It's impractical to read *every* headline email. So I typically start the day by first deleting every unread headline email from prior days. Only today's news. But, it has indeed increased my news consumption. My personal laptop was hosed a while back, and I've not fully recovered from certain applications (Radio included) being tied to my desktop PC at home. This makes a difference. In regards to the way the email presents information (or lack thereof in the case of the blog link), it seems I remember there being a pretty detailed template that you can configure in the preferences section. I think I'll go see what I can tweak there now.

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