Because Sharing is Nice

As I mentioned recently, I've figured out RSS, and I'm very happy with it. You can get your own RSS reader from Google here. The benefit, basically, is that it puts all the blogs and websites effectively onto one page, so you're alerted when something new is posted, and you don't have to browse around to figure out when and where new posts have gone up. The downsides, which are minor in my opinion, are that one, often there's quite a lag (up to a couple of hours) between posting and showing up in the reader, though often it only takes a few seconds for new items to show up. Two, you often get only the introductory lines, or pictures/embedded videos don't show up so you still need to click over to the full post. Three, you don't get the full formatting of the site, nor all the site's links and other extras, just the content of the posts. So if you follow others' links or enjoy their sidebar features, you still need to click over to the site itself to access those items. Four, ditto comments. You need to go to the site to read and post comments.

But another item of interest, which I'm about to start exploring is "shared items." Any post showing up in the feed can be marked as of interest- "starred." This allows the user (me in this case) to mark things that are longer than I want to deal with at any particular moment, for example, but to go back and find it quickly and easily. I can also mark it as "shared." All shared items get posted to a page called (oddly enough) "Lockwood's Shared Items." If you click on that, it should take you to that page. These are generally things that I think are interesting enough to write a post on, but when all is said and done, either don't have the time or motivation to post. If you generally enjoy the stuff I post here, you'll probably generally enjoy the items I've shared. Do you have a shared items page? Let me know in comments.

Followup: Okay, interesting. Apparently, the items are posted in the order that I clicked on them to share. And just as with the feed, many of them are just the first couple of lines- if you're interested in reading the full post, you'll need to click through to the original posting site. And it seems only 10-12 items get posted per page, so you need to look at a number of pages to see the whole list. Have fun!