In my continued exploration of the pressing question, “Can RSS help me keep up with the vast numbers of blogs I want to read?”, I’m also trying out Bloglines. Instead of pulling RSS feeds together in a client on your machine, Bloglines uses a web-based, server-side approach: You upload your subscription list and then you can log in from anywhere to check your subscriptions. It’s smartly designed; my one complaint — and one reason I’ll probably stick with Radio for now — is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you aggregate postings from all your subscribed blogs onto one page that you can scan. Instead, you get two panes — a window on the left with folders for each subscribed blog, and a window on the right with the postings for the selected folder.

Why don’t I like this? Well, for me, the labor-saving aspect of an RSS aggregator is that I don’t have to click on one bookmark after another in my browser to check the blogs I want to check. I want to scroll down one long page (which is what Radio gives me). Why would I want my aggregator to make me click on one folder after another to catch up with my subscriptions? Isn’t that awfully close to the way my browser works? Put everything on one page for me — or at least give me that choice. Since Bloglines is a relatively new service and it shows every sign of having been carefully designed with the user in mind (Mark Fletcher’s blog tracks its progress), I can only hope that it will offer this feature at some point.
Addendum Oscar Bartos points out in the comments that Bloglines does offer the one-page view, though it’s not intuitively obvious or called out in any way. I’m going to live with it for a few days but I think I’ve found my RSS home, at least for now…

As part of my own ongoing (and often losing) battle to work more efficiently I’m experimenting with trying to read as many of the 100-plus blogs I try to follow using an RSS aggregator. For those readers who are still in the dark about this whole concept — and, despite the excitement in the blogosphere about RSS, an awful lot of people still know nothing about what it is — the idea is that, instead of calling up blog after blog in your Web browser to see what’s new, you have a program on your computer that periodically checks “feeds” from those blogs to find out if they’ve got new posts, and collects headlines from those that do so you can peruse them in one place (and click through to those you want to read).

I posted about my own preferences for RSS use recently, and got some helpful responses. Over the weekend, I took John Robb’s advice (thanks, John!) and installed a version of Radio on my laptop to use solely as an aggregator. I’ll keep reporting here on my experiences. So far I’m finding it helpful, though I’m noticing that certain blogs’ feeds are idiosyncratic in ways that I’m not finding helpful: For example, Josh Marshall’s doesn’t actually link to the story that’s being teased; and the feed from Radio Free Blogistan includes a brief headline but no excerpt from the post, making it harder to figure out what the post is about.

I love the RSS aggregator in Radio Userland and I use it all the time. But it’s on a desktop computer that is not conveniently accessible outside the Salon network. So I’m looking for an aggregator that I can install on my laptop (it’s a Windows machine) to take my feeds with me wherever I go. I like the “all on one page” format of Radio rather than the multipane, RSS-headlines-like-emails-in-Outlook approach of so many popular aggregators. I found Amphetadesk, which seems to suit my needs.

However as far as I can tell it’s missing one critical feature of the Radio aggregator: in Radio, the aggregator presents you with a whole mess of items to read, and you can easily delete them with one click once you’ve read the page. Then you won’t waste time the next go-round looking at stuff you’ve already read. This adds a huge level of efficiency to the whole process.

Is there any other aggregator out there that pulls all your feeds onto a single browser page — and lets you delete-as-you-read?

Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!

I got back last night from a two-day vacation to over 2000 emails in my inbox. Over 1300 were spams correctly tagged as such by our server’s Spam Assassin. Of the remaining mail, several hundred were” real” messages, and another several hundred were debris resulting from the latest round of Outlook viruses.

The good news is that that debris is coming to me as the result of *other* people’s being infected by the virus and trying to send mail forged under one of my (or Salon’s) addresses. I get the bouncebacks because of that forgery. But I don’t worry about being infected myself because (a) of course I never click on spam attachments — most spam never gets opened or even seen; and (b) I don’t ever go near Microsoft e-mail software.

Outlook is a joke. No sane computer user today should use it. If your company makes you use it, go to your CEO and explain how much time and money his company is losing by using it. I use Eudora; there are several other good non-Microsoft products depending on what platform you’re on. Both Mozilla and the Open Source Applications Foundation are developing or already offer free e-mail clients as well.

Kevin Werbach writes, “Either email is broken, Microsoft’s email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” I don’t believe they’re the same at all. Microsoft email is broken, and it’s time for people to wake up and move on.

Done patching your Windows system against the Blaster worm? Then you’ll have the time to read this piece from CSO Online: “Patch and Pray.” It uses the saga of the Microsoft SQL Server “Slammer” worm from last winter to explore why and how the whole patching process has gone astray.

As the volume and complexity of software increases, so does the volume and complexity of patches. The problem with this, says SEI’s Hernan, is that there’s nothing standard about the patch infrastructure or managing the onslaught of patches… There are two emerging and opposite patch philosophies: Either patch more, or patch less. Vendors in the Patch More school have, almost overnight, created an entirely new class of software called patch management software. The term means different things to different people (already one vendor has concocted a spinoff, “virtual patch management”), but in general, PM automates the process of finding, downloading and applying patches. Patch More adherents believe patching isn’t the problem, but that manual patching is…. The Patch Less constituency is best represented by Peter Tippett, vice chairman and CTO of TruSecure. Tippett is fanatical about patching’s failure. Based on 12 years of actuarial data, he says that only about 2 percent of vulnerabilities result in attacks. Therefore, most patches aren’t worth applying. In risk management terms, they’re at best superfluous and, at worst, a significant additional risk.

Oh yes, this is the year after Bill Gates declared the crash “Trustworthy Computing” initative.

Paul Boutin (who has written for Wired, for Salon, and now for Slate) generally knows what he’s talking about, but I think he got one thing wrong in his otherwise smart analysis of a report that Linux will soon overtake Apple’s Macintosh system, measuring by number of desktops in use.

Linux is fast, cheap, and reliable, in defiance of the old engineer’s adage that you can only have two out of three.

That sounds good. And yes, Linux is a fast operating system. But the way I’ve always heard this adage applied, “fast” meant how quickly a piece of software can be developed, not how speedily it ran. (I was first introduced to this saying years ago by Dan Shafer, Salon’s first webmaster.)

And Linux, in truth, has not been “fast” in that sense: Like most good software, it has taken years to grow and evolve and build its strength, from the early ’90s, when Linus Torvalds wrote the earliest versions, to the late ’90s, when it became the cheap Web server of choice (and Salon moved its entire server platform to it), to the present, when the desktop-user side of things is just beginning to come together. One constant theme of Andrew Leonard’s superb coverage of the open source/free software movement for Salon since 1997 has been this: that its developers, whether of Linux or Apache or Mozilla, take their time; they’re not rushing to market to meet a corporate deadline. They’re iterating, as programmers like to say — putting some code out, weeding out the bugs, building some more code on top, and gradually assembling something great. Cheap and reliable, yes, but hardly fast.

On the larger Linux vs. Apple point: Yeah, I imagine Linux will surpass Macintosh in sheer numbers of installed desktops at some point. As Boutin says, free is hard to fight. What I find interesting — and what Boutin doesn’t really acknowledge or deal with in his article — is how effectively Apple has rekindled developers’ interest.

At geek conclaves like the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, where once you’d see Macs only in the hands of the occasional journalist or graphic designer, it’s the programmers who are now sporting PowerBooks and showing off their tricks on Apple machines. By rebuilding the MacOS on a Unix base, Jobs managed to stoke some serious geek energy. For the first time in years, there are interesting new applications — media tools, outliners, odd little programs — coming out for Macs that Windows users can’t get. That’s an amazing comeback, whatever the consulting firms say about desktop market share.

A Moving N.Y. Times op-ed by Ellen Ullman about how cross-generational knowledge transfer is suffering in the software industry with so many programmers out of work. Read it for her encomium to the “mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers” that are the sources of innovation.