Lisa Call

Markings #19    ©2008    56" x 58"

Beta Bloglines

For the last year I’ve let my blogroll mostly stagnate – not just on my blog but also in my feedreader. There is a proliferation of excellent blogs out there and I just couldn’t keep up. The dual maintenance of adding a blog to both my feedreader and my blogroll was too much to think about.

I want to catch up to some of the great blogs I’ve run across out in the wild and also by many of you that comment on my blog. The first step was to make this a manageable process and find a feed reader that would do these things:

• Keep track of my read vs. unread articles for me as I travel between home and work. This pretty much required it be webbased
• Have a simple mechanism for organizing the feeds, preferably drag and drop organization.
• Provide a mechanism to share my list of feeds so I could avoid dual maintenance.
• Provide an efficient mechanism for reading through my unread articles quickly.

Beta Bloglines is the only reader (out of the entire two I thought about) that fulfilled those requirements. Google reader is nice but it doesn’t provide that type of sharing I am after. If it had, I would have selected it.

This morning I finished moving my current blogroll over to bloglines and I’ve updated my sidebar.

My Blogroll

What I’ve left on my website are just a handful of my most favorite links (I wasn’t ready to nuke the entire blogroll!) That’s not to say I don’t love and read tons of other blogs and I recommend all of the blogs on my list.

I feel my blogroll is out of date. I know I ran across some really great blogs the last year and I failed to subscribe to them. So as I find them again, I will add them. Consider this a work in progress.

I’m not so sure about my organization of the folders. I had too many people in the ‘artist’ category so I broke it in 2 parts – it’s not very intuitive. So I suspect that will be changing when something strikes me as more useful.

What am I Talking About

If you have no idea what a feed reader is or how you might use one. Or even more importantly, how to make sure your blog can be read by a feed reader, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s, as usual, excellent post on how to do this. And don’t worry – by default blogger and wordpress.com blogs have feeds so you are probably fine.

Full or Short Content

My only caveat about her post, as I mentioned in her comments. I really don’t recommend posting only a short summary of your posts in your feeds. Interestingly I was planning to post on this exact topic as soon as I finished my blogroll update.

People are lazy. We spend inordinate amounts of time at my day job thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks needed to do anything in our products because people don’t like to click. They tend to stop doing things that require too much effort. In my opinion having to click an article and leave a feed reader to see the content counts as too much hassle.

I don’t share Katherine’s concern about the dangers or risks of content scraping. She has valid points for her – I just view it differently. Yes – people steal my content – but I do not believe it harms me. My images are hotlink protected so it’s just my words floating around out there on splogs and I just can’t get excited or worried enough about it to care. I don’t track them down and I don’t see it being a big deal. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but blissful is the keyword and it’s working for me.

The big names I read, such as Seth Godin and Gapingvoid, all publish their full content. So I figure I’m in good company.

So as a reader that is lazy – I request and recommended your feed always be the full content of your site.

Markings #19

This is one of the 3 pieces completed in 2008 included in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern, which closes on March 19th in Boulder.

I love this piece. I know, I’ve said that about many of the pieces in this show. Once I got the show hung my fear that this series was not so good evaporated. I’m pretty excited about many of these pieces and have ideas for more.

I love the red here. I love the small piece of blue-gray interrupting the pattern and making it more interesting. I love how I moved beyond straight horizontal lines between rows. It was a trick to construct this piece but it made for a fun challenging puzzle, part of why I love working with the construction processes I use.

 
Detail image: