Feed Me

I’m starting to look into RSS newsfeed aggregation. I know big words. Basically it’s kind of like the list of news stories you get on a lot of web portal homepages like My Yahoo, Earthlink’s Start Page, MSN, etc. Instead of reloading a thousand times a day all those websites that you read regularly to see if there’s a new article, you subscribe to the RSS feed and use a news aggregator to do the checking for you. Like checking your email. You get a little synopsis of a new post when it’s available, and clicking on “Read More” takes you to the website to read the whole post.

I’m trying to simplify things. And as much as I love Safari, there’s some kind of memory leak / resource hog bug that if I leave it running for a few hours, it’ll consume all available CPU power on my machine. So I figure if I can leave a more system friendly program running and just load Safari when I need to, that might be better.

The two big Mac OS X RSS programs are NetNewsWire and PulpFiction. PulpFiction is brand new and I’m checking that one out first. One thing that I immediately like, is that it uses Apple’s WebKit to include a built-in browser. It’s like having Safari without running Safari. I wonder if it has the same CPU problems?

I use My Yahoo as my default homepage when I browse the web. Over the years I’ve fine tuned the modules it offers to make sure that I have everthing exactly where I want it. Weather immediately in the upper left hand corner with movie releases and box office immediately below it. A news photo in the top center, and all the different Reuters, LA Times, E! Online and other feeds below that. I’ve found that it’s a good thing to take a look at that “Choose Content” button every few months because they sometimes offer up new things.

One new feature that is in beta testing is, you guessed it, an RSS newsfeed aggregator. So I’m also looking into that for keeping up with all the weblogs, Mac info, and game news that I read. Of course that means running my loved and hated Safari. But I’m really used to that. And I’m also really used to quitting it and restarting it every few hours. It’s very possible that I will prefer to stick with what’s familiar.