Distraction

Unusually for a technically-minded person these days, I don't use an RSS reader. It's probably because I don't actually have the time in the morning to page through the huge amounts of rubbish on blogs and so on. I tend to rely on more "traditional" methods, like actually going to Web pages.

I have a little ASP.NET page running locally which aggregates the various cartoons I read in the morning; no RSS reader is ever going to get the beauty (or at least functionality) of squeezing eight cartoons onto a single Web page.

I also read the news from the BBC Web site, and I browse blogs.msdn.com. Now, while I like blogs.msdn.com in general, there are a number of things that really irritate me, and I sometimes wonder whether I'm alone in it.

After all, if I'm reading that page, why when something happens should I see five posts about it? All of which link to the same place? In fact, links-only, content-free blog posts really annoy me and I would prefer to filter that. Ditto non-English - I may be able to laboriously translate French, but I'd rather not, and Russian and Japanese (particularly when expressed as empty glyphs) is just not useful.

Clearly, therefore, I need to get an RSS reader and filter the list. But I also want to know when new posters appear. And I need to share this list between home and work (so I don't see a load of out-of-date posts when moving between the two). Hmm.