rethink(ip)

My RSS Aggregator Scared Me

Posted by Douglas Sorocco at August 15, 2005 09:02 PM

It's not really Friday, but I missed a few the past month or so - so I will take a personal perogative and post a TGIF on Monday.

I was scared of my RSS aggregator - really, I was terrified of loading up FeedDemon and being bombarded with RSS feeds, thousands of unread posts, and watchlists with more entries than I could count.

Since I basically took the last two weeks of June and all of July off from blogging and reading RSS feeds, it was all there waiting for me. An entire summer of tablet PC, droning legal analysis and "productivity" posts staring me down. Simply mentioning the word RSS made me break out in a cold sweat. I was a bad bad blogger. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

I avoided looking at the aggregator's icon when searching for other programs. I could imagine my aggregator speaking to me: How dare I ignore it - didn't I know how important everyone's words were? Didn't I need to keep track of all the legal bloggers? Wasn't I afraid of "missing it" - the next best thing in legal blogging? Everyone was reading great things and I was being left in the dust. What was wrong? Didn't I know what I was missing?

I looked into the dark abyss and my aggregator was staring back at me.

Thing is: I really didn't care. I read a couple of books - printed on paper, not eBooks. I drove around going to estate sales and garage sales looking for antique tools to rehab. I painted a room. I watched foreign movies and spent too much time obsessing over Blues albums.

So, this evening I screwed up my courage and started up FeedDemon and cleaned everything out that was older than a week. Poof -- 45,000 posts instantly gone. I could almost hear their cries - "nooooo..... I'm melting."

As it turns out - my aggregator didn't come after me. I am still alive and there isn't anyone waiting behind the bushes outside my house to beat me senseless. It felt good - it felt liberating.

So, for now the score stands:

Abyss - 0
Douglas - 1

What was I so scared of in the first place?


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