rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2005-01-16 (04:47)
In which our plucky young hero is really simple.

The advantages of just aggregating the holy hell out of everything:

1. Any one daily-ranting service going down is a drop in the bucket. Once you've got 200 different subscriptions from 190 different sites, you need never fear withdrawal. One service's complete collapse (and I'm not pointing fingers here, at least not until the "point a finger" page inside Diaryland's member section actually loads, which takes an average of 98.2 clicks) didn't stop me from reading the Nielsen Haydens, or Cory and friends, or some random press release about Paul Martin. Gated communities, even ones that don't lock their gates (anymore), suck.

2. You'd be amazed how much less stressful it is being a member of the public who only gets to hear about events that are safe for the world to read.

3. No need to compulsively reload anything every bloody ten bloody minutes anymore.

(3a. Compulsively looking in the upper-right corner every bloody sixty bloody seconds to see if the notification icon has gone from light to dark, indicating at least one new entry has arrived in one of your two-hundred-odd subscriptions, really is much healthier. Stop snickering.)

4. Aggregation puts you one Perl script from never having to see the words "meme", "DRM", or "missile defense" again, which given the right mix of subscriptions can reduce your reading time by approximately 69,200 hours a month. (I am a DMCA-protected rot13-encoded counterballistic indie rock poodle. What are you?)

5. You think I'm setting up another barely-veiled slam at LiveJournal when I talk about how some sites just improve a thousandfold when you can look at their readable content without suffering through craptacular unreadable design and poor color schemes, but now you're just being paranoid.

6. Every minute I'm talking about RSS aggregators is a minute I'm not thinking about i18n and l10n and all that other g10n s3f.

7. But it's also a minute I'm not taking care of the girl with the flu in the other room, so nuts to this. If anyone says anything I'll see it in the morning anyway.

sirilyan.diaryland.com | sirilyan dotcom
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