For some time, I was frustrated that the number of times I looked at various blogs to see if they changed wasn't matched by the number of times I got hit by people who claimed to be avid readers. Then I was told about news feeds, and I understood, although I still spent far too much time on days off checking the same list of sites.
But I finally got round to doing something about it. On-line news aggregators didn't seem to work - I think I have subscriptions to a couple lying around, and I couldn't get into posting links on them, or going back to them to check them - I mean, if I'm online, why not just go and look at the blog? I have a blogroll - but there is a lag in the time it takes for updates to happen and for it to flag "NEW" material - and also it continues to flag it as such even when it is read. Also, it would have artificially boosted my own hit rate to keep checking what was new through my own blog, which seems a little dishonourable.
So a desktop version was what I needed, and after a bit of trawling around on the internet, I came up with RSS Reader. This stores links to all the blogs etc that I want to stay updated on, sits in the XP system tray, and changes colour when on one of its regular checks identifies new material. Pretty good. Sorry, all those people who were getting lots of hits from me (perhaps particularly this, this and this).
