Tom Eppenberger Jr’s blog

I’m ditching FeedBurner (which will be a whole separate post someday soon), so for those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, please make sure that you are pointing to http://tomeppy.com/feed/

I keep hearing from family and friends that I don’t post enough here. WTF?

Anyways, I have started a ”link blog” through Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice) which can be seen over there on the right side. Check out some of the links, as they will always end up being more current than the posts here.

Oh, and if you are reading this in a feed reader, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed of my link blog.

The only reason that I have re-signed up in the MySpace army, is because some friends have decided to only blog there. Since they all have private profiles, and you are unable to see the blog without being signed in, I was not really left with a choice (Yahoo 360 all over again).

After getting my account all setup and verified, I started looking at my friend’s blogs and subscribed to all the RSS feeds and what not. Immediately, I found what I perceive to be a big problem… partial text RSS feeds.

I really hate it when sites offer RSS feeds, but only bother to put the first sentence or two in the feed. This totally eliminates the value in using an RSS reader. If I wanted to have to go to a web site to see what had updated, I surely wouldn’t be trying to read it in an RSS aggregator. Bastards.

A quick Google search turned up a tool from “Make Data Make Sense.” They have a number of MySpace RSS tools, the crown jewel (IMO) being the “MySpace RSS Creator.” Give it the RSS feed for a MySpace blog, and it will pump out a new, full text, RSS feed. Wonderful.

I don’t really ever see myself using MySpace for more than just viewing other folks content (Yahoo 360 all over again), but they do offer other RSS tools for calendars, comments, podcasts, etc. Check it out if you are all up into the MySpace thing.

It’s been a long time since I used Newsgator Inbox. I’d given up on it shortly after the most recent version of FeedDemon was released, and then gave up on all Newsgator products after using Google Reader.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I think Google Reader is far superior in many ways to any other RSS reader around today. Period.

My biggest problem with Google Reader was finding a good way of integrating it into my daily habits. The sad reality is that I spend most all day looking at or referencing something in Microsoft Outlook… It’s the one application that never gets closed on my tablet.

There was no quick and easy way for me to take something out of Google Reader and quickly create a task for it or flag it for follow-up in Outlook. I tried many things to make this work, but nothing stuck. The best thing that I came up with was to Share the posts I wanted to follow-up on in Google Reader, and then use the built-in RSS reader in Outlook to only subscribe to the feed for my Shared Items. This turned out to be rather painful and pretty ugly.

So, even though I am not 100% on it still, I am back to using Newsgator Inbox. It works very well with Outlook 2007, and even though it takes longer for me to get through the 129 feeds I subscribe to, I know that I will be far more productive when it comes to my daily routine.