Dr. Bootsie Grapples with RSS, Liferea, and Buzzwords

I spent more time that I meant to recently reading about RSS, news aggregators and something called Web2.0, the "living Web." I've been using Amphetadesk, a news aggregator, on my Macintosh for quite a while, but I find myself doing more and more work on my Linux box, and I thought it might be interesting to try reading news there. That reader is fine, but when I checked their Website, I found the last update was made in 2002. I thought it might be worthwhile to try a new one in Linux-Land. Here are some RSS feed reader resources I found helpful.

• RSS Compendium - RSS Readers - Linux/Unix. This source tries to be comprehensive, listing all Linux RSS news readers.
• RSS Readers for Linux. A page from "RSS Specifications: This site is a comprehensive rss reference detailing everything you need to know about RSS." This is an informative, attractive site. I haven't finished reading all the interesting pages yet.
• RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators Directory :: hebig.org/blog This list includes Web-based utilities, handheld devices, and all sorts of platforms not included in some of the other lists. I haven't read everything interesting in this list, either.
• Liferea. This is the news reader I finally installed. One important reason I chose it was that it is available as a .deb file as part of the Debian testing sources. All I had to do was type apt-get install liferea and voila there it was. So far, so good.

The third item on the list linked to the author's Web presence, Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig. Here I found many fascinating things, and I expect this will become one of my "regular reads." I found his photographs of Endangered Machinery quite beautiful. I particularly enjoyed the article about Web 2.0 from Joel on Software - Friday, October 21, 2005. Joel on Software says:

I'm starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite....Now it's tagging and folksonomies and syndication, and we're all supposed to fall in line with the theory that cool new stuff like Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us are somehow bigger than the sum of their parts. The Long Tail! Attention Economy! Creative Commons! Peer production! Web 2.0!

I feel better already!