~larcher

It took me a bit longer than most, but I finally started using an actual feed reader for my blogsurfing activities. Up until a few months ago, I’d just been reading blogs through my list on blo.gs. However, my list of regular reads had grown since I started using the service, and I realized I was missing posts. blo.gs lists things in order of which one most recently had a new post. So, blogs that don’t update too often get pushed off the top by sites like Boing Boing that update 30 squillion times per day.

So I started using Bloglines, reading the feeds instead of clicking over to each blog in a new tab. Much faster, much harder to miss stuff you don’t want to since it tracks which posts you’ve seen.

Les Orchard makes a good point in his review of the new Google (feed) Reader:

Anyway, what I look for in a feed reader is how well it enables speed skimming: I’m going to ignore 70-90% of what I see in feeds, so I don’t want an aggregator which helps me carefully and methodically pick my way across the headlines.

I realize this is exactly why I like bloglines for reading the big blogs .. blogs with a high post count, but where I only care about a fraction of those posts. I scroll’n'scan through a day’s worth of posts, middle-clicking on anything that catches my eye.

The other feedreading method I’ve been trying lately involves rss2email and the IMAP account on my server at home. Posts get converted to individual emails which I can then read from Thunderbird on any of the computers I use. I lose the scannability factor, but it works great for the blogs where I normally read every post. ( sidenote: I picked rss2email because there it had a Debian package – “apt-get install rss2email” .. lazy me )

Since I got around to using feeds, I was finally motivated to make my own feeds useful. I added one from Feedburner that mixes in my del.icio.us links and Flickr photos along with the regular blog posts.
woo. And according to the “Analyze” tab on Feedburner I am currently my only subscriber

running wordpress now .. yay! major design change too, but only because it was easier than squeezing the old look into a WP theme .. still adding things. And I need to get AIM blogging working yet again

update, 5/23/2006: for some reason, this post was attracting all the comment-spam .. so I’ve disabled comments for this post

Along with the new host, I finally got around to installing some web stats software .. and by install I mean I clicked the “Install Webalizer” button on the host’s management page .. sometimes it’s nice to do stuff the easy way

Anyway, I’m looking at these stats .. and one single host has accounted for nearly 70% of the traffic (>200 megs of it) and 40% of the hits. Holy crap! About every 4 seconds (!?) I get a hit from rss.allresearch.com with a user agent of "Mozilla/4.0 (WebClipping.com)". And if just grabbing all of spoon.cx in less than a minute wasn’t bad enough, they’re fetching each page multiple times .. in the same day .. not the front page of the blog or anything, but the archives, pages which haven’t changed in years, literally! Some of these pages they fetched 100 – 200 times in the last 2 days!

So this new host also has the ability to block IP’s .. that address again was rss.allresearch.com or 38.144.36.19. For now, this is faster than telling them their crawler is broken, assuming they don’t already know (which I bet they do) and that they care (bet they don’t) .. At least I get a chance to try out that new nofollow tag