Dumpling in a Hanky

Last week was a very trying week for me, website wise. One of those weeks when you just want to scream, because you can't believe people would do such frustrating things. I monitor a lot of web sources for news that's relevant to my employers business, and to do that, I rely heavily on RSS feeds. They allow me to see the output of sites quickly, and mean that I don't have to visit those sites repeatedly each day to be able to track their content. So, RSS feeds are VERY important to me. And in the context of Government sites, they're important for the general public too, helping to enable them to see what's happening in various departments, e.g. if consultations have been published that they might want to respond to, or if new regulations have been issued that may affect their business. Meanwhile...the Government has stated that it's consolidating websites into the www.gov.uk address, and 24 departments will be moving to that address over the next 18 months. ...

Master of none!  I’m haunted, you know. Haunted, by RSS feeds, from sites that I monitor, taunting me with their unread status. And for the bulk of them, the magical “mark all as read” button doesn't work, as I need to go through them all and check if there’s anything relevant for work….and work covers a LOT of topics! Some of the legal topics I need to be aware of for work reasons (for Scottish, English, Welsh, Irish and European jurisdictions, where appropriate): banking, finance, environment and pollution, construction, tax, corporate rescue and insolvency, planning, commercial litigation, employment, planning, and intellectual property. And all their many, many sub-areas! Library topics I need to be aware of for professional reasons: UK law libraries, Scottish law libraries, international law libraries, UK public libraries, UK academic libraries, Scottish public libraries, Scottish academic libraries. Add all these areas together, an...

Bloglines, I'm not going to mince my words here, or break it to you gently: it's all over between us. I don't know if you noticed, but I actually dumped you about a month ago. I'd got fed up with your lack of attention, your seeming lack of knowledge that I existed...but the final straw was when you went away. For a day. Without telling me about it. Eventually, you got your idiot friend the plumber (or whatever he claims to be) to make an excuse on your behalf, but it was too late. I didn't trust you any more. How could I, when you left me in the lurch like that? At least Google was there for me in my time of need. I'd given it a backup version of my feeds long ago...I never thought I'd have to turn to it in desperation. Look what you drove me to, Bloglines. Goodbye.

....I love you, really, I do. I know, I know: I may have become slightly disillusioned late last year, and threatened to leave you for Greader, or Netvibes, or NewsGator, or any of the other feed readers I tried out when you were having "personal issues" and trying to "find yourself". But I stayed with your original version, I didn't desert you for that fickle Beta, I liked you just the way you were. And I didn't get on with those others like I do with you. And I thought you appreciated that. You bucked up your ideas, sorted yourself out, and I thought we were happy together. Until this week. My dear, why do you now think I want you to import every post, from every feed I take, dating back to 2007, all marked as new and unread? I mean, it's nice that you want me to have comprehensive information, but really, it would have been better just to stick with what I asked you to do, which was supply me with the feeds, and make them go away once I'd read the...

I tell ya, it takes at least a week to catch up on the week you were away...and now I'm off to Dublin this afternoon until Sunday, so I can only imagine how long it'll take me to catch up again when I get back! One useful thing I have done while on holibobs though is play with Yahoo Pipes, to create a feed of feeds. After being a total doofus and needing the help of the lovely law.librarians group to fix things (how come they could easily explain what a video didn't?) I've had a stab at making some usefulness from the UK Librarian Bloggers wiki, starting with (hopefully) a feed of all the academic library blog feeds on there. If I'm lucky, you should be able to do something with it, like subscribe to it. Although I haven't got as far as actually testing that theory myself. Hopefully, you'll find it here : http://pipes.yahoo.com/jennie/ukacademiclibraryblogs And even more hopefully, it'll be useful to someone! Let me know if it works, and if it's u...