To continue from my post and subsequent comments on ‘mucking about with rss’ I thought I’d try being useful and posting my solutions for the benefit of others.
I tried the methods of utilising rss suggested by Mark and Si but have found the best thing for me I’ve tried so far is a combo of google desktop and Wizz RSS. This is not yet a perfect approach but it does what I want mostly, next thing is to streamline the process.
Originally I was using just Wizz but I found it clunky. Essentially what I am doing at the moment is using the ‘feed search’ function in Wizz on pages I like to find RSS feeds, this returns all the feeds available for that page which I then add to the Web clips gadget on my google sidebar. (I have turned off the auto-add-feed function on this!) This way I get what I wanted, which is an at-a-glance view of what’s new on sites I regularly visit accompanied by a snippet of the article. I augment this with the news widget for general news which I can scan through whenever bored.
Inevitable downsides to this system are that, having installed the whole google desktop thingy I have a smaller desktop space on my monitor and less available memory. Also I have a whole extra toolbar in Firefox of which I am only using one button! Positive side-effects include googlebars’ scratch pad widget, saving me from abusing notepad, and google calendar. I’ve had it for about five days now. How did I live without it?! It contains all of my social and business appointments along with outgoing direct debits so I have tighter control of my finances!
To streamilne I shall attempt to find a more suitable firefox plugin to get feed url’s and maybe buy a bigger (or second..?) monitor to give me more desktop space. Sounds like a plan. A bigger monitor for working on and a second monitor for monitoring news, appointments and running downloads. Someone come and confiscate my credit card please…
