Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Either BlogLines does not update half of my feeds or this is the most silent weekend ever. With my 200+ feeds the only things that I get to read are del.icio.us feeds and posts by a couple of hardcore bloggers who live in a different time zone.

I understand that not everyone can shoot ten posts a day, like I do it. But at least one a day is a fairy deal. Don’t you think? Am I alone on this?

I always find it fascinating how some people get an idea, develop it, implement it, and then turn it into a real success. BlogLines is a good example. Today I came across an interesting post that shows where from the Bloglines started:

I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.

I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.

What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).

Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.

That’s from Mark Fletcher’s blog. Mark Fletcher is the CEO of BlogLines. The post was written on 4th of March, 2003. That’s slighly more than two years ago.

While trying to convince the administrator of Cyprus Forum to add RSS feeds, I’ve wrote this rather long post that explains what is RSS, why one would want to use it, and how to use BlogLines to manage one’s RSS feeds.

Nothing new and fancy - just a simple explanation for RSS newcomers, with a screenshot of my Bloglines interface. You might find it useful. Or you might find it not. I’ll leave that up to you.

BlogLines added yet another feature its amazing array of options. Now it is even easier to monitor weather forecasts for locations. The announcement of the new functionality is here.

Extensions for Firefox are great. There are so many of them, that sometimes good ones hide and pass unnoticed. Greasemonkey received a lot of publicity, but still some people don’t know about it. Greasemonkey allows for insstallation and usage of numerous user scripts that fix problems with famous sites and make certain sites more usable. For example, there are scripts to remove all sorts of advertisements from feeds displayed by BlogLines, make del.icio.us and Slashdot look better, or add some aggrigated information to IMDB pages. The best thing is that there is no need to restart the browser between installations and removals of these user scripts.

Try it! It probably fixes annoyances that you are complaining about on a daily basis.