March 22, 2005

So it's come to this... Aren't you sick of visiting your favorite websites to see if they've been updated? There's so much laborious clicking and typing involved. That's no longer a problem thanks to this wonderful website, which will e-mail you daily with a list of updates to the websites you visit.

We're officially so damn lazy that surfing the 'Net is a chore. Coming soon: a Java applet that handles those intense tasks of breathing and regulating your own heartbeat. I know this is a little old, but I searched and searched and couldn't find another post about it anywhere. Sorry if this is a repost.

posted by Panleth 19 years ago
  • Isn't this sort of thing that RSS feeds are supposed to take care of? You point your own aggregator app at the list of websites you give a crap about, and your aggregator tells you what's on each of these sites. There are plenty of aggregator apps out there, but firefox has RSS support that's good enough for me. As an example using this site: * Go to the monkeyfilter home page (using firefox of course) * in the bottom right of your browser there's an orange icon which indicates that monkeyfilter has an rss feed * click on this icon and select the option "Subscribe to RSS". (It's probably the only option available). * add this link to whereever you like (for this example, put it in the bookmarks toolbar so it's nicely visible) * click on the bookmark and you get a list of stories on the frontpage of monkeyfilter. Problems with monkeyfilter's RSS and firefox's RSS funcitonality: 1. the monkeyfilter titles in the RSS feed make no sense at all. That's a monkey problem - we're not writing intelligent enough titles, just cool sounding ones. 2. I have absolutely no idea how often firefox checks the RSS feed. Nor do I have any idea on where I can set this value. I do this RSS-as-firefox-bookmark for all my del.icio.us bookmarks as well. The other option (which I use), is to have all my favourite sites in the same (del.icio.us)bookmark on my toolbar and then do an "open-in-tabs", get them all loaded at once and do a quick skim through them to see what's new.
  • I've yet to make the switch to FireFox (I know, what the hell am I waiting for?), but all that just further proves my point. And the question remains: How lazy is too lazy?
  • I've been using Newsfire, and it seems to check for updates about once every thirty minutes. I haven't looked at/played with settings, but I'm sure most aggregators have an adjustable timer. I don't see it as lazy when it comes to a site like metafilter, or slashdot, simply because information turns over so quickly that you can lose track of new vs. old. At least on MoFi we have the handy sidebar wossit. (I don't actually like rss feeds, I'd rather expend the vast amount of effort to click on my bookmarks and go to the site.)
  • How lazy is too lazy? You could possibly use the time you saved on endless fruitless refreshes to do something else, no? I'm all for lazy.
  • tracicle, I'm not a big RSS fan in general either, but being able to bookmark the RSS feeds of your own tags from del.icio.us is bloody brilliant. Besides that, I don't use RSS at all. I just have a delicious tag called "hourly" (of all the crap I look at often mofi/mefi/altslash etc) that I spray open into tabs in firefox whenever I want to see what's new.
  • How lazy is too lazy? Pre-packed grated cheese.