It seems like I had time at one point in my life.  Unfortunately, that was then, this is now.

I just pulled up NetNewsWire.  It has been a while, probably 3 years.  Over 300 news items.  NetNewsWire is a great program for RSS feeds on OS X.  Maybe other platforms, I don’t know.

I used to follow a lot of photography, blogging, NASCAR, and other news feeds.  While I’m still interested in those things, I don’t do a whole lot of photography (it’s a hobby that I’ve not had a lot of time for), and I haven’t been following NASCAR nearly as much.  The blogging stuff started seeming more about blogs to make money.  I’m not making money on this blog, nor my other (siliconcreek.net).  This one is all hobby, and siliconcreek is part work (it has probably served me well as a marketing tool).

Part of what made NNW so hard to keep up with is many of the people/organizations I was following post for money, and others were news.  They post daily (or so).  It can get annoying when someone stretches for content.  Maybe daily postings work well to make money on AdWords or get you great ranks in search engines, but I can tell when an author stretches for words.  The interest fell.  I stopped using NNW and removed it from the dock on my MacBook Pro.

I can also find some really interesting stuff that seems refined.  In fact, this morning I started my computer day reading about a flood in 1941.  It was a long post, but it was so interesting  I couldn’t pull my eyes from it!  The author of that blog doesn’t appear to post on a schedule – he did 7 posts in November, 37 in December, and 17 so far in January.  I looked at another blog, two posts, it just started, but it looks interesting. I looked at another one, the last 5 posts go back to August – many contest and EME results. The posts aren’t long, but it is good to see others on the air, even if it is modes I don’t operate (I currently operate SSB and FM only, but that’s going to change… someday!).  I saw another that included several steps of building a kit radio – very interesting, but like the rest, posts aren’t to a schedule.

And there is NO PART OF ME that wants to try to get these guys to get on a schedule.  Forget that!  I don’t post on a schedule, why should they?  And they, like me, don’t always get their posts to twitter.  And twitter, well, I have hundreds of tweets in my timeline.  I can’t keep up.  I’ve adopted a “dip in and out of the stream” attitude (thanks Connie for the idea!).  I will on occasion look back, but generally what happens when I’m not watching gets ignored.

So I decided last week to clear NNW and start finding these guys’ blogs and put their blog RSS feed into NNW.

The clearing part feels good, man!

So I’m going to start reading the infrequent posts of some of the friends I’ve made on twitter and Google+.  I will eventually add that as a blogroll here.  Baby steps.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to start adding things to NNW.

EDIT: it appears I’ve selected a theme that doesn’t make it easy to find the RSS feed.  It is http://www.ac8jo.us/feed .  I will be fixing that sometime soon! 🙂

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