Techcetera

Here are two vaguely related short pieces, neither of which seem to warrant a separate post.

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This is probably a pretty late realization on my part, but I thought it fit to share with everyone in the hope that atleast one person might benefit from it.

I like reading blogs on specific topics. I usually discover blogs by word-of-mouth or blogrolls on blogs that I already visit. But I've always wanted a way to automatically detect blogs or specifically, blog posts related to topics of my interest. That's when I discovered Google's Blog Search. It lets you search within the blogosphere, much like the way we search the Internet as a whole.

But wait, it gets a lot better. In addition to letting you search for blogs by keyword, Google's Blog Search allows you to subscribe to the search results. This really cool feature means that you can add a search as a news feed to your feed reader, just like you add any other feed. After that, any time somebody blogs about something that you're interested in (i.e. one that matches your search criteria), Google will fetch it for you, without you having to search for it again and again. Admittedly, this takes laziness to new heights, but it also gives you great power.

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A few months ago, I was searching the online edition of every South Indian's favourite newspaper for RSS feeds and drew a complete blank. When pretty much every international newspaper and even some leading Indian trash mags had cool interfaces and were publishing RSS feeds, The Hindu had a despicable website design and didn't seem to know or care about the less controversial meaning of RSS. The irony was that I first learnt about news feeds from J. Murali's weekly column in the same newspaper.

Accordingly, I shot off a letter to the newspaper, deploring their lack of interest in exploiting new technology to deliver content to devoted, but remotely located fans like myself (embellished with a lot of soft soap, of course).

Since then, The Hindu's website has remained an eyesore, but for a reason that is probably completely unrelated to my admonition, it has woken up to the power of news feeds. At their site, I found no less than 65 RSS feeds, ranging from general ones like the Main Page to highly specific ones like the Friday Review for the Thiruvananthapuram edition.

Now all I need is some piping hot filter coffee in a steel tumbler and my mornings will be perfect again.