How aggregating...

This is one of those things I post that makes Joe say, "Huh? - Where are the pictures of the fat boy?" So, honey, go here for pics and here for the latest video.

So, if anyone's still here, when I first started this whole blog thing back in two double-ought three, I was supposed to be looking into RSS -- syndication, publication, parsing XML -- for work. The aggregators I started using to monitor feeds from news sources (and blogs) were Bloglines & FeedDemon. I never was a fan of Bloglines, except for the fact that it was web-based, meaning I could sign in from any computer and there were my feeds, just as I left them. Initially, I had two licenses for FeedDemon - one at home and one at work and I didn't necessarily have the same feeds (reading lists) in each location. Then, NewsGator & FeedDemon got hitched, and not only could I sync up FeedDemon at work with FeedDemon at home, I could also sign into NewsGator & there everything was.

Then, Google got in the game... And I imported my OPML file and tried it out. And I really wasn't happy with it. Yet.

Then, Google released some new Reader features and it was better, and I started using it to monitor some of my stuff and thought I'd like to use it for everything, if only...

If only it would sort my unread feeds oldest to newest.

Then, Google listened to me (and a WHOLE bunch of others) and here we are now...

I've switched to the Google Reader as my only aggregator. Yep. All 346 of my feeds now live in the same place.

And if you monitor more than a dozen blogs/news sites/flickr pages/searches on a regular basis and don't use an aggregator, you might want to check it out for yourself.