Rebuilding My RSS Subscriptions
Published on 15 Mar 2006 · Filed in Rant · 427 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)For a variety of reasons, I am in the process of rebuilding my list of RSS subscriptions. OK, so I forgot to export my list to an OPML file before I installed Tiger. This gives me the opportunity to weed out some RSS subscriptions that weren’t very helpful (not for me, anyway—that’s not to say they aren’t helpful to others) and add some new ones, as well as focus on certain areas I know I’ll be working with a great deal.
For example, my new company has already told me they’d like for me to focus on virtualization (especially VMware) and Citrix. So, I’m adding some RSS feeds that target those technology areas. I had several virtualization-related feeds already, but I’ve only managed to locate one really good Citrix-related feed so far, and that’s from Brian Madden’s outstanding site (the feed can be found here). (I highly recommend his work, including his books—I use his Citrix MetaFrame XP Advanced Technical Design Guide fairly regularly.) Already I’ve found a couple of good articles that I intend to review in more detail over the next few days (don’t be too surprised if links to them show up here).
On the flip side, I’ve removed some feeds that were just generating noise. Novell Cool Solutions (feed here), while useful to Novell experts (which I’m not) and those tasked with supporting Novell networks (which I don’t), just aren’t helpful to me. Likewise, I weeded out a couple of redundant Mac OS X feeds and a couple of Microsoft Exchange feeds. Some of the feeds that got removed from my list of regular feed subscriptions will be moved into del.icio.us as bookmarks in the event I need to refer to them later.
Finally, the Tiger upgrade has also afforded me the opportunity to review my choice of RSS aggregator. I had been using PulpFiction, but that application has been languishing since the sale of Freshly Squeezed Software to a new owner (although I saw rumors that development was going to pick back up soon—I certainly hope so). I really wanted some improved integration with new Tiger features, such as Spotlight and Automator, and evaluated a number of applications. I’ve finally settled on NetNewsWire, which I’m going to run for a while to see how it fits into my workflow (and take full advantage of the trial period). It doesn’t have Spotlight support (yet), but it does support Automator and AppleScript, and I’m beginning to like how some of its features work. It’s rather different than PulpFiction (not better or worse, just different).