5Aug

Wherein Cynra Enters the 21st Century

Let me preface this post by stating that there is no way that I could ever be called a technophobe¹: I’m an engineer in a technology-driven industry, I’ve been dabbling with webdesign for well over a decade now, I’m a longtime gamer, and getting my hands on some of the newest gadgets around delight me to no end. However this apparently doesn’t make me immune from seeking low-tech solutions to everyday situations.

For months I’m been visiting numerous blogs in the World of Warcraft blogosphere. I’d visit the often wonderful sites, read all of the content there, take notes[1. I'm not exagerating. You'd be surprised to see how many damned notes I have on rogues right now!], and then comment. Day after day, I’d go one by one through the sites, hoping that they were updated so that I could see new ideas, new thoughts, and new awesomeness. However, doing this over the course of months and stumbling across sites that weren’t updated frequently or ultimately became neglected meant that I would be spending more time looking for updated sites than I did reading the new content.

This was clearly not acceptable.

The solution? I finally downloaded and installed a feedreader, specifically Sage for Firefox. At this point I can optimistically say that I am raptuously struck by the awesomeness of feedreaders.² After spending almost a half hour trying to figure out how to add feeds — apparently it’s not as easy as just clicking a link or bookmarking a site — I found myself with a veritable agglomeration of some of the best World of Warcraft blogs around. No longer do I need to visit sites multiple times during the week to see if they’ve been updated; now with the click of a single button I can easily see which sites have been updated and which have grown complacent.

I do this all in my drive to be one of the most — if not the most — proliffic commenters of the World of Warcraft blogosphere. Really, it’s the only way that I actively contribute to the community!

There are a couple of things that I learned while gleefully re-visiting all of those sites yesterday to add them to Sage:

Make sure that your site has a feed. A couple of sites didn’t seem to have feeds, which was disappointing. However, I found that staple blog hosts like Wordpress and Blogger have feeds already set up so that I could easily manually add the feed even if it wasn’t listed on the site.
If you have a feed, make the link visible! This was a big issue for a lot of sites. For example, I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to find the link for The Egotistical Priest’s feed because I knew that I wanted to have the site added. Hiding it down at the bottom of the page really isn’t acceptable; put it up top, make it easy to find, and using one of the universally recognized symbols will help people like me a lot. I found that people who were hosted on Blogger overwhelmingly had layouts that hid the links to the sites’ feeds at the bottom of the page with the smallest font possibly ever envisioned.
Open up commenting. I find it disappointing to stumble across sites that only allow you to comment if you have a Wordpress/Blogger/Google account. I have none of the aforementioned and I really have no interest in ever getting one. Many sites allow the use of Open ID and I can fall back on my account for AIM, but is it really that awful to let visitors to comment and leave behind their names without relying on an account? There’s one site in particular that I love to visit and I always want to comment but find after writing up this huge response that I can’t reply at all! It’s exceedingly irksome.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Speaking on commenting, I was going through Askimet this morning to clean out all of the comments tagged as being spammed and stumbled across this:

Whaaaa?

Well, random spambot from the past, thank you for linking my site elsewhere. That post, “These Are the People in Your Roleplaying Guild,” happens to be one of my favorite — even if I can’t take credit for the content. Unfortunately, I will not be returning the favor this morning or any time in the future.

However, I will share the link with Tallaa, who would probably be very interested in the contents of said site!

Unlike my gnome rogueling Tzigane Thistledown who definitely is a technophobe! ↩
Go ahead and try to say that three times fast. ↩

Responses

You know, I’m a pretty tech-y person myself and I still haven’t followed through on downloading and using a feed reader. I’m not sure why! It’s a great idea though and I think you’ve inspired me to actually do it now I need to have the time to read all the blogs I will want to get feeds from!

Elodim said,

5 August 2008 at 2:26 pm

Okay - I’ll do it! Like you, I have been simply opening blogs from my bookmarks.. “Open all in tabs.” It is like a little treasure hunt, but you are right - time to get with the program i guess.

I’m off to download the reader myself…

Gothyelk’s last blog post: Gothyelk Goes to Mount Hyjal - Victory!

Gothyelk said,

5 August 2008 at 3:10 pm

Glad you finally discovered readers!:p I’m guessing #3 is regarding a certain short-statured clothie healer, and it annoys me too. I do have an old wordpress.com account so I suppose it’s slightly less of a pain for me personally.

Awlbiste’s last blog post: Brag Post

Awlbiste said,

5 August 2008 at 3:11 pm

I’m using the RSS support in Mac’s Mail app. Its pretty good, allows for folder grouping, and it easy to hide away from your workspace.

I have about 61 wow blogs at the moment, and I scan them and flag the posts that I want to comment on. Then I created a special filter that only shows the flagged blog posts, which gives me an easy to navigate hitlist of items to comment on, or follow up.

typhoonandrew’s last blog post: Downranking Paladin Tank stats

typhoonandrew said,

5 August 2008 at 8:12 pm

Fantastic, just what I was looking for, though as the EU servers are down tonight, I actually have time to visit all the blogs, now I can pick up their feeds while I’m doing it

Thorn said,

5 August 2008 at 8:47 pm

It wasn’t untill I had been blogging for a couple of weeks that i discovered the joys of Rss - alot of my geekier friends don’t use it so its never come up in a technological discussion .. but its awesome! I use google’s reader, but only because it was the easiest at the time to work out and I already had an account so I didn’t have to sign up to yet another site. The danger with RSS feeds is it becomes an addictive. I’ve started adding feeds for some of my Local LJ communities so I don’t need to log into LJ to read, adding writers news, New SF books, Local news bloggers I like - My entire days net browsing could prob be rss’d, and adding new feeds all the time..

Zahrah’s last blog post: Gnomes have four fingers - Trolls and Taurens Three

Zahrah said,

5 August 2008 at 9:12 pm

Welcome to the world of readers Cynra!

I use the google reader as part of my iGoogle page and find it very easy to use.

In other news: Eszti can haz raid with us now please?

Jezrael’s last blog post: Bear Mount!

Jezrael said,

6 August 2008 at 12:31 am

Thanks for all of the well wishes and congratulations, everyone! Living in the 21^st isn’t as scary as I first envisioned.

For those who have been inspired by my heroic effort, go forth and download! I very much enjoy the simplicity of Sage and the fact that I need to manually refresh the list; it means that I can leave the window open and not worry about it refreshing at an inopportune moment (such as when I’m healing in Hyjal Summit when we’re down a healer or two!).

Take heed, however; once you step into this brave new world and harness the power of the feed reader, you shall forever be a changed man! The power of the reader is life-altering.

Awlbiste: What kind of girl do you think that I am, that I would give out names? Well I never!

Jezrael: Not this Friday, sadly. I’m supposed to be moving across the country within the next week or so (there’s no specific date due to my mother’s current health problems), so I didn’t sign up. However, I’m hoping to be available in future weeks until I do make The Big Move.

I misses my huntery sisters. <weeps>

Cynra’s last blog post: A Contest I Have to Enter!

Cynra said,

6 August 2008 at 1:11 pm

I’m a big fan of google reader. It does everything you’d expect a reader to do (tags for sorting, stars for bookmarking, etc), and has the benefit of being able to be used anywhere that has a browser, which means multiple computers (work/home), reinstalled fresh computers, and you never lose your place.

gowwriter said,

8 August 2008 at 12:36 pm

Y Halo Thar!