Conall's Blog

So, for about a year now, I’ve been using Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice, since I found simply reading RSS feeds saved me time surfing through 20+ websites regularly. My configuration grew to something which now has 80 feeds (a few blogs, but mainly current affairs, IT related news, IT security bulletins and a few publications) and I use Bloglines’ Export feature to export the list of blogs straight from my Feed Reader to my sidebar here.

In the last few weeks however, like others, I’ve gotten annoyed with Bloglines acting like a yoyo, going up and down and up and down – every time displaying that annoying plumber. So I decided I should try and export my Bloglines setup to a new Feed Reader – Google Reader.

I’ve been using it for 2 weeks now and I have to say I’m not looking back. The UI took some initial getting used to, but the “j” and “k” hotkey setup is nice and familiar, although I never did bother learning the Bloglines hotkeys. I believe I’ve retained almost all my previous functionality while gaining a few new ones – the one exception being the ability to export my blog feeds to WordPress, but I’m sure there is a Google Reader API somewhere which can give me that functionality.

Overall, I’m quite impressed.

Since the end of the year is fast approaching, for good measure I’ve got not one, but two trips abroad coming up.

For the first week in December, I’m going to Washington DC to attend the LISA Conference. Since this is likely to be the only time I’ll go to Washington DC, I’ll probably take in the Smithsonian while I’m there.

Then, 6 days after I return from Washington, Ciara and I are off to Edinburgh, bringing my personal tally of plane trips to a grand total of 18 for 2006.

So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking that I don’t have anything to report here. I’m still not sure I really have.

Basically, I’ve been quite busy at work and nothing significant otherwise. I have started to be more cultured in recent times, having gone to see Orestes and the last night of The Festival Of Short Plays this evening.

On the nerdy front, I’ve finally gotten around to reading up on Python, which I’m actually starting to find fun to use (which is quite uncharacteristic and therefore a surprise to me).