PiXELWiT

After reading my last article, you might think that I’ve abandoned reading RSS feeds altogether due to my concern with “shadowy librarian spies” but that’s definitely not the case. In fact I have quick, easy and anonymous access to a comprehensive list of Flash feeds ready to read the very moment I feel the urge to monitor the Flash-O-Sphere’s heartbeat. All I have to do is Read Somebody Else’s Feeds. That particular feed list happens to belong to Neil Webb and I have to admit, it covers just about everything I’m interested in and a good deal more.

One of the best aspects of reading other people’s feeds is that you don’t even have to lift a finger to create or maintain the list and the web interface is so simple all you have to do is point and click, no tagging, sorting, or signing-up is required… simple and easy, the way the web was meant to be. 😉

Of course there is a downside. Not everyone makes their list of subscribed feeds freely available and finding a feed-list to match your tastes may be difficult. To make matters worse, once you find the perfect list of feeds, there’s no guarantee that the owner won’t change things around and ruin your Utopia. So what do you do if you find somebody else’s feed list that seems pretty good, but it’s missing a few of your favorite blogs like… let’s say… ummm… PixelWit.com? Well, you could continue your quest for the perfect publicly accessible feed list or you could augment a public feed list that’s ‘good enough’ with your own preferred feeds.

If you use FireFox, there’s a lightweight feed reader plugin called “Sage” which lets you bookmark, organize and access your favorite feeds from within FireFox. Sage doesn’t demand an e-mail address or a subscription to set up and the FireFox plugin is a simple install. If you don’t have a huge list of feeds, Sage might be the best feed reading solution for you.

So now you know how I help keep the ‘shadowy librarian spies’ at bay when reading feeds.

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