preraphaelitepunk.com

The newest widget I’m experimenting with is TagCloud, which (if you’re actually here rather than reading this post on an aggregator) you’ll find in the sidebar, down a bit, just above the Flickr banner. It’s supposed to create a cloud of keywords used in posts, which sounds rather interesting, but as I write this it’s still just saying “This cloud currently has no data. If you have just added new feeds, please allow several minutes for this cloud to be updated.” It’s been saying that for the last 10 minutes, so I’m beginning to lose hope that it’ll ever be updated. Oh well. I’ll give it a few days, I suppose.

RSS Readers. Despite its flaws, Bloglines continues to be my favorite aggregator. Being able to mark items as unread and hold them as long as you need to, and keeping everything organized by its source, more than make up for its occasional two- to three-day lags. Pluck’s plugin tool seems to have a grudge against RSS2 feeds and completely ignores them; their Web-based reader may be better, but it seems you’re only allowed one account per e-mail address and I can’t find the way to switch from plugin to Web-based. Feh. Kinja was highlighted a while ago on that source of all that is good and geeky, Lifehacker,* but personally I find its digest format to be distracting. Articles from different blogs should not touch; it leads to cross contamination. (Also, images don’t seem to come through on my feeds, which defeats much of the purpose.)

One thing I do dislike about Bloglines, though, it the repeated posts. Turning off the “treat updates as new” option helps, though it means that I miss out on any revisions or corrections. However, that’s really worth it for some of the worst offenders; Gizmodo* and Vegan Freaks,* in particular, are very bad about either repeatedly posting or making some invisible change without clearly marking it, so you wind up getting the same basic article up to 10 or 12 times. Maddening. It would be nice if Bloglines automatically compared updates to the previous versions, and provided a redlined update that clearly indicated which bits were revised. Oh well.

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*See blogroll for links.