bestkungfu weblog

When I moved to the Northwest, I was faced with a choice: I could live in Seattle, where the action is, or in Bellevue or Redmond, across Lake Washington, where it was expected I would work. I lived in Redmond for about three years before finally crossing over into Seattle, where I’ve spent the last three.

One thing I noticed in this process: when you live on the Eastside, you think, “gee, it sure is great living up here. I can visit Seattle whenever I want.” Eastsiders consider themselves to be a part of Seattle.

But when you live in Seattle, the Eastside doesn’t exist. The only time a Seattleite like me goes there, outside of potential work engagements, is to shop at obscure geek hangouts like Vetco, or check out the Apple Store (which won’t be necessary, once they open in the University District this November). It’s a bother just to go there, when I have everything I want in my own little enclave.

Likewise, since I crossed over from perusing weblogs one-by-one to using an RSS aggregator, very, very few sites without RSS feeds have survived the transition. I’ve substantially changed the way I consume blogs since converting to RSS, and it’s just a hassle, relatively speaking, to seek out the off blogger who hasn’t got a feed readily available. Still, there are a few sites that I remember to check periodically (Hi Joe! Hi (non-work-safe) Molly!), because, like that Bellevue Apple Store, they have enough value to me to be worth the trip, despite being a pain in the ass. (The sites, not the people. But surely you knew that.)

This issue came to a head for me when I came across a blog that I decided I’d like to keep up on, and discovered (horror of horrors!) that there was no feed to be found. I’m still wondering how often I’m going to be keeping up on this new site, since it hasn’t yet proven valuable to me, and may not, if I don’t make a special effort to audition it.

What to do? Who’s going to step in, if not the authors? Should aggregators integrate parsing of arbitrary HTML pages? Will there be (or are there already) transcoding servers that allow users to convert pages into feeds? Or are sites without syndication feeds just going to slip through the fingers of people as they become converted into the RSS ranks?