Blog Standard Stuff

Sometimes you don’t realise just how much you rely on something until someone takes it away from you. I’m not thinking legs, eyes, internal organs and such like, nothing that important, but nonetheless I really suffered when Bloglines stopped working for me at work (is that ironic -at work, not working?). I had put all my eggs in that one basket – making use of centralized services is all well and good until that service is made unavailable fro one reason or another, including:

1. The site/service makes its way on to a blacklist that is farmed out to firewall services
2. The site starts using external JavaScript files that are blocked by the firewall
3. The login is moved to a 128-bit encrypted page which is blocked by your place of work

These all happen to me frequently at work. I cannot log in to del.icio.us and add a favourite, I can’t check on Flickr any more (although I should be doing work, I’m sure some of you are saying!). But the biggest loss was Bloglines. I tried other web-based services immediately after but they usually fell foul of point 3 above, and even if they didn’t then point 2 would usually catch them out. So then I gave up.

Having just come back from SXSW 2007, I realise now how much I’ve missed out. I do have a news reader but Newsfire on the Mac does not suit so well, despite its brilliance, because I tend to read my feeds during the day and I cannot connect the Mac while at work, it’s a definite no-no. So today I decided that enough was enough and managed to find a decent web-based RSS reader called Feedshow. It seems to do everything I need it to and I’m really looking forward to removing my head from underneath that proverbial rock that it’s been under for the last few months.

Now, if only I could find a workaround for adding del.icio.us favourites, viewing my friends’ Twitter posts and logging in to Flickr, I’d be a very happy man. Not so sure that the boss would be though :-D

[tags]RSS, feeds, feedshow, bloglines, freedbacking[/tags]