Aggregation and Fascination

I’m not sure how I have geeked the day away, but I have. After getting
my aggregators that collect to my Handspring, I idly happened upon
some reference to
William Gibson’s weblog
. “Hmm,” thinks I, “I can add
his RSS to my aggregation.” Well, on the page that
has his RSS info
is a reference to a Mac OS X desktop aggregator
called NetNewsWire. I’m
interested in aggregators and in finding spiffy OS X apps, so I
download it. It gives you a typical 3 paned Outlook/Eudora style
interface, where the left pane is the subscriptions and the right side
has an upper panel of blog entries and the bottom is the current one,
rendered out. Familiar stuff for almost any current computer user.

I installed NetNewsWire and I really like it. The interface works fine
and all is cool but the real killer part of the app for me is the RSS
autodiscovery. You don’t have to know the RSS url to aggregate
it. Enter what you do know and it will find the RSS url. I entered,
for example, the URL to a weblog on Userland, and it discovered the
RSS, even though there was no link to it. (I guess that’s a well known
url format.) I’m just guessing but it looks like it looks for a link
to the RSS xml off the page, and failing that makes a few guesses
(rss.xml, index.xml, index.rss) unless it already knows about the
format (for one of the major weblogging sites.) Cool stuff. We’ll see
if I’m still so high on it in 30 days that I’m willing to pop for
it. There have been several of this things lately that I was knocked
out the first day and uninstalled within a week (Zoe was like that,
frex.)

A side-effect of all this blog nerding is that I ran across a blog for
Ellie Lang. Ellie
is one of those people that I wish I knew better. She’s always been
extremely nice to me, back in the days when she was a publicist and I
was a radio show producer. I think the last business type dealing I
had with her was when she was with Del Rey and Bob Salvatore was
coming through Portland. I’d see her at Dragon*Cons and she always wangled
me invitations to things, including events at some really really swanky
places. I almost never was able to go, but I always appreciated
it. One of the downers of ceasing the radio show is that the framework
for talking to some of these people that I really like went away and
wasn’t replaced by anything. This then falls into the natural
progression of not keeping up as well as you’d like with people. Sad,
but that’s how it goes.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.