Being the busy little beaver I am these days, I don't tend to get as much time to look around on people's websites as I'd like to (no, genuinely, I don't!). Combine that with the news, current affairs, tech sites, web comics, and photo galleries that I like to keep tabs on, it makes for a fairly exhausting litany of bookmarking & clicking.
The web application that has therefore saved my life is Google Reader.
RSS and ATOM feeds are nothing particularly new, however this takes feed aggregation one step further and allows you to manage everything from a web-based app: brilliant, because it means not having to install your favourite reader client software on every computer you go to.
Quite a few blogs and blogging packages offer feeds as standard nowadays, however one that was evading me was Blogspot (now Blogger, also owned by Google). It turns out that getting a feed from any Blogspot blog is dead simple. All you need to do is add “rss.xml” to the end of the URL, and there's the feed address! So the feed for Kat's blog would be http://theadventuresofkat.blogspot.com/rss.xml.
Of course, having people read your blog via a feed rather than page hits tends to screw your statistics a bit… guess that'll be another thing for me to overhaul whenever this supposed blog rewrite happens. While I'm at it, I guess I could fix the output format of my feeds to they're not just one great big unintelligible slab of text.
Now all I need to do is work out how the hell to get a feed out of my Livejournal Friends Page, and I'm home & hosed.