Finally, I get feedburner

So I have off for Martin Luther King day today. I found myself with a chunk of time, and decided once and for all, to make feedburner work for me. Happily, I can now say that I did that, and can move on.

You will notice the bright orange RSS logo on the side there… that now squishes my blog, del.icio.us links, and flickr images together for a nice big mess. Just the way I like it.

Feedburner is not hard, but I had no patience for it. I was under the assumption that you added your feeds, and there would be a grand final step where you could parse them all together. I kept looking around for this final step, but it turns out this is not the case. Instead, you choose one of your feeds, and then add little “enhancements” to pull in specific alternate feeds, such as del.icio.us, and flickr. Lame, compared to what I was thinking, but much faster than writing my own parser.

Of course, I’m sure everyone else out there understood this, so I’m being redundant. Oh well. That’s what you get when you try to learn everything from scratch.

Minor distractions

In an effort to keep my mind occupied elsewhere, here are a couple of distractions to share.

The Magical Minimalism of Microformat – The New York Times tipping their hat to Microformats

Internet Explorer 8 – Please don’t be lying, please don’t be lying, please don’t be lying…

Email Standards Project – Please turn out to be relevant

Odiogo – Convert RSS feeds to podcasts. I rarely ever listen to podcasts [ok, fine, I never listen to them], but I still like the idea.

RSS newsreaders

I am a big fan of Sage, the RSS newsreader plugin for Firefox. In my move, I have tried a few other apps that I thought would be a little better at handling the on-again, off-again nature of me checking my favorite feeds.

I tried Vienna for mac, as it was free, and it worked on my laptop (since I had already packed up the other computers). I liked it fair enough. One of my problems was the keystrokes required to mark all the posts in one feed read, but… aside from that, I had no real problem. (I learned a trick though, the listed keystroke is apple-shift-k, but really, all you have to press is k by itself! Useful, but still on the right hand side… not ergonomic enough.)

Since the PC was the first computer unpacked other than the laptop, I thought that I would give a windows reader a try. I settled on FeedDemon. I like the stuff it does on its own… the type of display, the checking, and the default behavior of folders. The thing I can not stand is the poor usability of the application. The keystroke for marking all feeds in a folder as read is fairly similar to the browser reload… it’s control-shift-r. My brain defaults to that occasionally. The real problem is that it has a separate keystroke for marking all posts in one feed as read, which is control-shift-a. Well, as my brain is hardwired for r, I have pressed that on more than one occasion when trying to mark all posts in a feed as read. What does this do? Well, it marks all posts in the folder I am in as read… and since I imported an OPML feed, it marks all of my feeds as read!!! I’ve already done that at least 5 times. Yes, it is trivial in the grand scheme of life, death, and taxes, but not insignificant for me.

I think that I am likely to go back to Vienna for the moment, with SharpReader (oldie with no bells-or-whistles, but it works the way I would expect) at work. If Vienna can’t convince me pretty soon, I may have to go back to Sage. (Further stating what a great plugin it is).