what you need
I was asking people what their feeds were yesterday and hank didn't know what I was talking about, so I figure it's high time we cover a few bases. There are some great toys out there that make your life better, and here's what they are.1) A feedreader. What it does is checks feeds for you and reads them. Then it grabs them and presents them to you all together, so that the ten blogs you read every day, you don't have to go to individually, and if there's a link there you are dying to read, you can go to it easily.
I just heard that the WV coal miners turned up dead. The families are bummed out. But I think the real losers are the cable news channels. Has anyone asked poor Anderson Cooper how he feels about this stunning, very sad, tragic reversal? We love you, Anderson!
Anyway, any feed you put in gets scraped by your reader, and it's nice. You don't realize how much you read until several times a day there are sixty or more posts sitting there waiting to be read. I am annoyed at some sites that don't publish as a feed, such as mimi smartypants and wood s lot. Out of the caves, people!
So that's the feedreader, a really great invention. I have already explained that I use linux's liferea, but that windows people can use "feedreader", and mac people can get the gui-licious ifeed. That last was made up; couldn't resist.
2) A flickr account. Get one already, because when you want your pictures somewhere that won't melt, flickr's got you covered. After watching tinypic disappear my shit, I'm down with the fascism of my flickr account. They encourage hotlinking, and that makes me feel good!
3) Firefox. It's wild that popups, malware toolbars, etc. have actually become par for the course when that need not be the case. People who use IE for anything but emergencies need their heads checked. I'll give everyone time ('cept safari users) to convert, then we'll cover favorite extensions at a later date.
4) Bittorrent. Get a good client, I use azureus. It's easy to use and does a good job. I normally go looking for stuff at isohunt. There are others and I'd like to hear those suggested. Anyone mentions Kazaa and they lose an index finger. There are other networks too, that we can get into when I start using them if that ever happens-- I've heard good things about inet and directconnect.
5) The web things are far too many to go into, but for now, if you want to hear some good music, check out Chillits '05 I beat metafilter to that by two days.
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