geek stuff 28 Sep 2006 11:08 am
Pulling it all together
After much reluctance I’ve gone ahead and somewhat embraced the blogosphere and Web2.0 and all the fancy internet jargon that’s being thrown around today. (As a side note, MySpace still sucks.) However, I found that once I started embracing it I became just inundated with “stuff” and had no real organized way of making any real sense of it. It used to be that there were only a handful of things I really checked with any regularity on the web: email, a few news sites, and a few message boards. However, with my own blog now and with several other cohorts and family members having blogs, I had to add that to the list. And once that was on the list, I might as well add blogs related to some of my interests (sports, programming, etc.) to the list as well. Oh, and they have a bunch of bookmarks online that they want to share as well. And so on, and so on, and so on…
Needless to say, what once was a short excursion I could repeat as needed (20-30 minutes to check all my email accounts, all the news sites, and all the message boards), now became an exercise in futility. Inevitably I’d “forget” to check one of the many things on my burgeoning list. In this day and age of information, that simply wouldn’t cut it, of course. So I was left with a problem: I liked all the stuff I would routinely check, but I simply didn’t have time to check it all and get anything productive done during the day.
Now, being the technologically savvy guy that I am (thanks to all the things on my list), I heard about Netvibes (and a few other similar sites like protopage and pageflakes) and decided to give it a try. I had tried protopage a few months before and was soured with how little actual content it gave me to help pull stuff together. It seemed mostly to just say “look what we can do with javascript, you can drag and drop stuff!”. However, now that writing a site that can do that is relative easy, that’s not as big of a selling point anymore and sites can no longer “get by on their good looks”, so to speak. Enter Netvibes. I actually was convinced to give it a shot by Brett, who wrote up a pretty interesting and fairly detailed comparison of Netvibes and Pageflakes here (for those who don’t want to read it, he is staying with Netvibes but thinks Pageflakes is promising). At first, it seems a bit daunting because there’s just so much stuff to put on there and all you start out with is a single blank page/tab. However, adding RSS feeds is pretty easy (and that’s what most of my stuff is), and setting up the email account checkers is fairly simple to do as well. The end result can be seen here.
The best part about it is I really only have to look at one place to see if I there is anything new in my World Of Stuff now, and that place is the “my stuff” tab on the top-left. Even when I’m browsing other stuff (or writing a post here), I can just look up and see if anything new has been posted at any of those places. So now I don’t even need to take the 20 minutes to check all the stuff I have, instead I just take 2 seconds to look up.
7 Responses to “Pulling it all together”
on 28 Sep 2006 at 3:00 pm 1.Chris said …
I’ve tried a number of those and was happiest with Netvibes as far as the ease of adding content and being able to customize. BUT then I had so much great content in one place that there was ALWAYS something new so I was ALWAYS going to look and see what was new. I was spending way too much time looking at new stuff.
So, I went with Google Homepage to put the del.icio.us bookmarks that I hit daily (fantasy baseball, Google portfolio, my blog, Google Reader), my Yahoo/Google e-mail inboxes, weather and Google Calendar. Then I tossed all the feeds into Google Reader so I have one source of “stuff” - news and blogs.
So my homepage has easy access to everything I need and by clicking on Google Reader I can quickly go through my stuff and saving off what I want to look at later in more detail, deleting everything else. Most importantly I don’t have notification everytime I get something new - easier to get things done.
on 28 Sep 2006 at 3:03 pm 2.Chris said …
Oh yeah, and don’t forget about co.mments - with this service you can have any comments for a blog entry come in via RSS so you can eliminate the time-consuming task of following up on old blog posts. You have to remember to hit “track” when you’re making the comment or reading the post, but that’s easier than going back every day or so to see if anyone wrote anything new.
on 28 Sep 2006 at 6:32 pm 3.Maria said …
I’ve been struggling with the same issue, and part of my problem is that my Sage bar is growing to tall (too many feeds). I gave Google Homepage a try, but I don’t like that every feed you add is a box using space on your page whether it has new stuff or not.
What I would love to find is something that aggregates better and only shows me new stuff from all the feeds I’ve subscribed to. I don’t want to see a perpetual box of 3-5 oooooold Eat at Joe’s posts (that Joe really needs to blog more often if he doesn’t want to be removed from my bar)… Does netvibes handle it differently than Google?
A thought regarding tracking comments… you may already know… All WordPress blogs publish a feed for each post’s comments. I’ve recently added explicit links to such comment feeds from each post. Lately I’ve been subscribing to comment feeds for a few select posts, and once the discussion dies I just remove the feed. Again, I would love it if I could find a tool that lets me aggregate only new stuff.
BTW Danny… thanks for keeping Mafe Maria. I started reading your post and went “oh-oh, I bet he dumped me”. : )
on 28 Sep 2006 at 6:33 pm 4.Maria said …
Ah! Just realized that you have the link to comment feeds also. Good!
Just subscribed to the one for this one…
on 28 Sep 2006 at 7:37 pm 5.Chris said …
Maria - that is why I went to Google Reader. I didn’t have room (nor wanted to use it anyway) for all the feeds - even with the new tabs that Google offers (which Netvibes already had).
You can have a Google Reader “widget” on the front page that shows only new things, all put together into one box - so you just have the 20 newest “stories” whether it be news, blog entries, comments, etc. Here is what the homepage looks like with Google Reader installed (usually I don’t keep the widget installed or I minimize it so I’m less likely to go read stuff while at work).
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=255242123&size=l
on 28 Sep 2006 at 8:47 pm 6.Petie said …
Wow, it sounds like you guys are all on information overload. I just read the 4 family blogs, so I have a lot less to track. Chris has me set up with RSS feeds from those, but on yahoo which isn’t the best. Is it that I don’t have any other interests or I just don’t know how to find more “stuff?”
on 28 Sep 2006 at 9:34 pm 7.Maria said …
Ahhh… Sounds promising… Thanks Chris. I’ll check it out ASAP.
I’m subscribed to sites I want to keep, but these people post once every year. And I’m finding good new stuff but I don’t have space for it… I’m having to *cough* bookmark (so archaic!)
Petie - I have good stuff to recommend, but you may prefer to live secluded from this curse. It’s the struggle of my days now.