Another neat process improvment: tt-rss

I've written about various geeky bits I use to streamline some things I do a lot of - bip and bitlbee for proxying IRC and IM conversations, having my own mail and groupware servers and so on. I just set up another one this morning: Tiny Tiny RSS (thanks to Leonardo Fontenelle for the tip).

This is a pretty humdrum one, and I imagine I'm a long way behind many people on this, but ah well. It's just a feed reader implemented as a webapp - so it's like using liferea only it runs on your web server (you, uh, DO have a web server, right?) so you can access it from anywhere. Or, it's like using Bloglines or something similar, except you run the server yourself, so Google doesn't get to add 'what blogs you read' to the already worryingly long and juicy list of information it has on you.

I wasn't using any kind of aggregator before this - I spent...er...rather a long time per day reading umpteen different sites (Engadget, The Register, Planet Fedora, Planet GNOME, BBC and CBC News, OS News, Linux Today, TuxMachines, and Slashdot, if you must know) via Firefox's bookmark toolbar, and compulsively checking a dozen or so others for very periodic updates (comic sites, a couple of git changelogs, you get the picture). This is just vastly better.

The only downside is that it's seriously affected my procrastination capabilities. I need to figure out some whole new thing to do when I want to avoid some particularly tedious work-related hoop jumping exercise. Damn it!