Too many blogs to read....
How do you guys keep up with all the blogs and forums that take your interest?
Since first reading a blog regularly, that would be Gary's, through the one blog, I have found many more of interest, including tonight, finding Mattians via Sarahs. Much as I love reading up on others exploits and have no doubt that they further my online education, it doesnt half eat into the day. I guess its not so much that it has to take up my time, more that its available if I want to spend some time doing something instead of doing the something that I should be doing.... If you get my drift. - Kind of along the lines of when you are supposed to be revising for that all important exam, or pushing hard to meet a deadline at work - suddenly, the spring cleaning/vacuuming/cd rearranging/phoning distant relatives/etc, all appear more important than usual.
I am currently just using googles personal homepage to keep track of the regular blogs I read up on. Is there a better way? Using google personal homepage also adds to time wasting and does the one thing I dont want google to do, it turns it back into a portal rather than a search engine. Also, it doesnt give me any indication of when a blog post has been replied to.
Is there any better/less time consuming way of keeping track of all this stuff, without me giving up half my working day? If you have any recommendations, then please bare in mind, I am a shopkeeper, so the one main stipulation is the price, ie. FREE is good. Also, if it is software, it just needs to do what it says on the can - I dont need frills, just something that will run on win98 with the minimum setup and the least amount of fuss.
And then there are forums....... Nuff said - so many, I cant read the posts never mind reply to them. I am sadly neglecting the osC forum at present, which should be all important to an osC store owner (and its generally a good read for a little controversy!)... dotdragnet.com, unitedforums.co.uk, warriorforum.com - The list is endless, especially as I am reading/writing when I should be working.
Whats the answer?
Cheers,
Rich
Since first reading a blog regularly, that would be Gary's, through the one blog, I have found many more of interest, including tonight, finding Mattians via Sarahs. Much as I love reading up on others exploits and have no doubt that they further my online education, it doesnt half eat into the day. I guess its not so much that it has to take up my time, more that its available if I want to spend some time doing something instead of doing the something that I should be doing.... If you get my drift. - Kind of along the lines of when you are supposed to be revising for that all important exam, or pushing hard to meet a deadline at work - suddenly, the spring cleaning/vacuuming/cd rearranging/phoning distant relatives/etc, all appear more important than usual.
I am currently just using googles personal homepage to keep track of the regular blogs I read up on. Is there a better way? Using google personal homepage also adds to time wasting and does the one thing I dont want google to do, it turns it back into a portal rather than a search engine. Also, it doesnt give me any indication of when a blog post has been replied to.
Is there any better/less time consuming way of keeping track of all this stuff, without me giving up half my working day? If you have any recommendations, then please bare in mind, I am a shopkeeper, so the one main stipulation is the price, ie. FREE is good. Also, if it is software, it just needs to do what it says on the can - I dont need frills, just something that will run on win98 with the minimum setup and the least amount of fuss.
And then there are forums....... Nuff said - so many, I cant read the posts never mind reply to them. I am sadly neglecting the osC forum at present, which should be all important to an osC store owner (and its generally a good read for a little controversy!)... dotdragnet.com, unitedforums.co.uk, warriorforum.com - The list is endless, especially as I am reading/writing when I should be working.
Whats the answer?
Cheers,
Rich
posted by richandzhaoyan | 1:52 AM
6 Comments:
Personally I subscribe to around 50+ blogs, article sites and news sites. I use Omea Reader to keep up with them all. It's free, and easy to use, similar to Outlook. You just copy the site or the feed address and subscribe to it in Omea (and when they upgrade the extension you can click a button in Firefox too!). It checks every half hour for new feeds and downloads them straight to your desk for you to read.
Very handy when you don't always have a web connection or just want some easy reading without have to visit every site.
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for the recommendation - I checked out the Omea website and thought it would be worth a try, went through the process of downloading, then having to install a newer version of .NET, only to be met with the message that it wont currently run on windoze 98!!!
Arrrrghhhh.
I am sure I checked for this on their website - But may have overlooked it, its been a busy couple of days.
Ahh well, I have emailed there feedback as they requested so will see if they come back with a solution.
Anyone else got any recommendations of decent readers, preferably ones that will work on my dinosaur Dell!!
Cheers,
Rich
Ahh sorry. Umm Feedreader is the one I used before Omea. That's a lot more lightweight, doesn't require .NET so perhaps runs on 98?
Cheers Sarah,
I will give your new suggestion a shot.
I have actually installed a reader called sharpreader, which also uses .NET and does run, kind of, on win98. It appears to be similar in features to the Omea reader you suggested and is a good bit of kit, but unfortunately it doesnt seem to cohabit well with Outlook Express - not on win98 at least. Shame, as I have gone to the effort of subscribing to the blogs I want to keep up on and it seems a very tidy bit of kit.
I will give feedreader a test over the next couple of days, and hopefully it will sort me out. Having seen how a reader can work, I now have an idea of how you can keep track of 50 odd blogs!
Cheers,
Rich
Just as a quick update - Feedreader looked good but after a couple of minutes of running, the right click feature packed up - the menu just appeared then dissapered like magic - No idea why, otherwise it would have been fine.
I am sticking with Sharpreader for the time being - it seems to work ok provided I start it up after starting IE and Outlook - dont you just love computers and win98 in particular..... How many AISers do I need to fund a new laptop?
Oli, thanks for posting - I have had a quick look at the Opera site and it looks pretty tidy. I am going to hold off from installing at present as I reckon my laptop has just about as much clutter as it can handle and I really need to get on with knocking a few sites out rather than getting to grips with new software. Much as I dislike IE, it is the browser that 90+% of my online customers use so I feel I need to appreciate the quirks that they do??!!? Make sense?
Cheers,
Rich
Feedreader looked good but after a couple of minutes of running, the right click feature packed up - the menu just appeared then dissapered like magic - No idea why, otherwise it would have been fine.
Feedreader, and most others, integrate with Internet Explorer in order to extend the features to include browsing. Right clicking in feedreader is IE dependent. So the error will have come from there.
The biggest problem I had with feedreader was that it could only store so many posts before it'd crash and the xml file used to store the posts would be emptied. Most people probably won't have an issue with that, I just subscribe to a lot of feeds.
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