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.