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Main | Next day (Jun 26, 2004) »
20040625 Friday June 25, 2004

And the winner is.... Bloglines.

Well that's not really fair, I haven't tried any others, but this seems to do what I want.

Let me back up. Earlier today, I asked what is the best RSS aggregator for me given certain criteria. 4 out of 5 people (either via comments or direct email - thanks) suggested Bloglines.

So I went to their website, registered in less than a minute. I then was able to validate my registration in the next minute and within ten minutes, I'd setup my profile the way I wanted to and added my first two subscriptions. I can even make my bloglines available to others.

Very nice.

Now my next questions is:

Q. Where is there a master list of RSS feeds?

I suspect there isn't such a thing. You find feeds my browsing around and discovering those little RSS icons, or suggestions from others but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Google are working on this in their labs...

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( Jun 25 2004, 12:33:48 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Dog days will soon be upon us.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry our son would like a puppy, so my wife and I have been doing a bit of research. There is a great site to make this a lot easier.

You answer questions on such topics as Size, Commitment, Compatibility Health and Protection and it returns a list of breeds that match your criteria.

We're looking for a small dog, that requires average exercise and grooming. A dog that isn't prone to illness and will get on with children and other pets and is fairly easy to train. We're not looking for a watchdog.

We feed in our answers and it gave us 20 choices. Top of the list were:

After reading their summaries of all the dogs, we actually liked four dogs further down the list:

I don't think they ask enough questions. I'd like them to ask:

Now we don't really want a pure breed. A mutt is just fine with us, and we now know what kind of muttyness to look for.

Tonight we are going to the humane society in Santa Clara to see if we can adopt just the right kind of puppy. They are having a Midnight Madness sale.

More to come in another blog...

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( Jun 25 2004, 10:03:41 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Books Sales in America

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned a library book sale here in Palo Alto, California. That was a little bit specific and not too relevant for most people because they live elsewhere. I'm going to get slightly more generalised now, and point you are where you can find out about book sales in America. Not perfect for the rest of the planet, but hopefully helpful to some.

Most of these sales are sponsored by Friends of the Library, so expect great prices. Palo Alto will always be my favorite (with Los Altos running a close second), but there are lots of other wonderful sales out there

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( Jun 25 2004, 07:59:45 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

RSS Aggregator - which one?

Time to start organising my reading of other peoples blogs and the interesting RSS feeds out there. Last night I was reading the RSS tutorial mentioned by M. Mortazavi. Lots of great stuff there, but it's very inconclusive of which tools to use.

There is just an over-whelming number of aggregators out there. I've also been taking notes of the ones that have been mentioned on our internal bloggers list, such as HotSheet, NewsMonster, PinkPanther, RSSOwl, SnowNews, Straw and, Syndigator

At the moment, I've no idea which one to pick, and I don't really have the time to do an exhaustive test of each one, so I thought I'd try a different approach. I'd specify what I'm looking for, and hopefully the folks reading this who have "been there, done that" can point me in the right direction.

Here's my criteria:

Pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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( Jun 25 2004, 07:56:50 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [5]