feed me RSS

I always thought RSS was yet another web-based specification that would take years to be fully accepted. Especially since the very essence of it is discussed fervently by A-list blowhards like Dave Whiner. Not to mention the scores of bloggers fueling the trend by pimping out their RSS feeds. Moveable Type builds one by default, you see.

So now Yahoo! News is offering up RSS in more than one flavor, depending on your news preferences. I felt that it was time to accept that the RSS spec has reached a point where it is probably usable, and decided to do some investigating for a reader.

If you have Mozilla or Firebird installed, Aggreg8 is a nice little plugin that you can use whether you're running the browser or not. It wasn't very intuitive to set up - and that's not a good thing considering there aren't many options. The UI is all out of order and the fact that some unnecessary fields had to be filled in kind of bugged me. If you want to see the benefits of having news feeds with a very unobtrusive tool, this is a good one to start with at least.

However if you really want to get fancy, you can go get Feed Demon. I think it's like pre-beta-1B-09er or some shit. It's very easy to set up, and provides all the trappings of what I imagine an RSS reader should be.

Speaking of RSS whores, have another one.