As I’ve mentioned before, I’m addicted to RSS feeds now — if a blog doesn’t have a feed, I don’t read it. I currently have something like 320+ feed subscriptions, and I’m trying to get it under control, but it’s such a great way to keep up with blogs.
One great side benefit is that, with NetNewsWire at any rate, I can see editing changes between versions of the posts. It’s interesting (to me, at any rate, the queen of minutiae) to see how some writers go back and reword their entries. I was just reading Glenn Greenwald (the go-to guy for info about the NSA Scandal) and his entry “Erasing the Cold War from history” had several edits. The substance of the post didn’t change, just the phraseology. It’s neat to see the editing part of the writing process — a big, important part that’s not taught nearly enough — in action.
Let me show you a short example:
But beyond
thethese self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’spostargument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful,enemy-less utopiaenemy-less, utopian era whichweno longerenjoy.exists.
It’s a little hard to read, but if I found it too distracting I could always open the entry in Safari or something.
Of course, sometimes this side effect of RSS feeds can be hilarious, when you see giant swatches of a post that have been crossed out, complete with secret information that obviously the writer thought twice about sharing with the world. In case you didn’t know? Caught by an RSS feed once, caught forever.
Seriously, you see the multiple edits? Is that a Mac thing? Because I only see whatever is the latest version. Unless there’s some other way to view the various edits. (Which I now want to do, you have me curious.)
Will do the four meme… just had to survive the read last night, so was too nervous to do anything else at the time.
Well…I guess I overstated the “caught forever” bit. (I have never exaggerated anything in my entire life!) After a day or so, the entry becomes just straight text, all revisions disappearing. A few weeks ago, Susie had half of one article crossed out, and I couldn’t figure out why she’d done it. Then later she mentioned that WordPress had eaten the entry, and did anyone have it? I went back to check and natch: the entry was now completely editless.
But whenever an entry is edited, it shows up in NetNewsWire as a new entry and the edits are available right then.