Task 9 - Still playing with RSS

I'm done with BlogLines but can talk more about FeedReader :)

My usual ways of adding feeds are

• Looking for the RSS symbol in the URL bar
• Doing an 'Edit', 'Find', and searching for 'RSS' in the page
• Looking for the symbol down the margin past recent postings
• Copying and pasting the URL directly into FeedReader

Usually I have no problems with any one of these but do occasionally come across sites that don't use RSS. Very annoying. I almost never use bookmarks now. If a site doesn't have RSS, I'm not coming back. Why should I have to go to the effort of hunting down new posts?

I have used programs which pull updated info from sites and create an RSS feed manually. They tend to be a tad unstable though and I find the poor little lonely empty feed months later when I'm doing a cleanup, realising it hasn't updated since one week after I added it.

Another peeve are news sites which split their content into 20 different feeds eg National Headlines, International Headlines, Environment, Tech, Entertainment, Home Life etc etc etc. And then fail to offer one feed for everything. I would much rather quickly click through irrelevant postings than spend 15 minutes manually signing up for all of them so I don't miss anything. Why don't they just let you click on a whole bunch and subscribe all at once?

The groupings are very generic as well - I would never sign up for a Fashion news feed, but what if I then missed out on an interesting story about PETA splashing red paint on models? - always a treat. Yes, it might be cross-posted to the headlines feed but it's all so uncertain.

Wow, I'm on a roll with the ranting today. That's what happens when a deadline starts looming, such as the need to finish 23 things, and it gets more annoying than fun.