Feed Me
So I just got on board with Google Reader. For those who know as much about Google Reader as I did 24 hours ago, it is a browser-platform thingamajig which watches like a hawk for updates on the pages you tell it are interesting to you. Then, when you visit the Google Reader site, it tells you which of them have changed since last you looked. For pages that don't come ready-made with an RSS feed, I have been using the marvelous Page2RSS to set up a makeshift one.

Right now, updates are flowing into my Reader at a steady trickle, but I have a concern that it will become unmanageable over time. See, I'm also a heavy user of Stumbleupon. There are a lot of sites which I'll Stumble to, enjoy, find the root page, read a few more entries - and then decide that while they are entertaining, they either don't update often enough or aren't quite interesting enough to be worth bookmarking and checking manually on a regular basis. So I surf away, and those websites, presumably, go off and sniffle in a corner and wish that I would only love them back because then everything would be shiny and rose petals would rain down from the sky.

It takes about 15 seconds to add a new feed to my Google Reader - maybe 30 if I have to set it up through Page2RSS - and that gets the barrier-to-entry-onto-the-list-of-things-I-pay-attention-to WAY down. I expect my blogroll to double, at least, over the next week. Webcomics will be slower, because I still feel obliged to read the complete archive of any comic before I start "officially" reading it and that's a major time investment. But I used to have a folder for irregularly-updating comics, and how much bigger would that have been by now if I hadn't had to ever visit the site to know that this was the sixth straight month it hadn't updated?

Oh, and I didn't like this habit of site design before, but it's really annoying now: I hate it when people don't have a single page which always has the latest update. A number of webcomics require you to visit the main page and click through to a static link to whatever has gone up most recently. In the event that these badly designed sites also don't have their own RSS feeds, I can't even fake it with Page2RSS, because it needs to watch a single URL for changes. This was just an irksome extra click-a-day before, but now it's throwing off my entire groove. I might have to stop reading Dr. McNinja over it - I'm just not sure it's worth a separate check all its own that I have to remember separately.