Shelley Howells: At last, search the web while you sleep

COMMENT

Much as I love trawling round the net, I'm not very interested in the techie side of it all, or anything that involves more than five minutes of effort to get up and running.

That's why (geek-speak alert) RSS aggregators have not been a part of my desktop life, despite their great promise of much coolness and time saving (they let you keep up with new and changed content of blogs and news sites that publish RSS feeds, without having to visit each site. This is a good thing if you visit lots of blogs and news sites).

I've spent, oh, a good 12 minutes - on more than one occasion - trying to get such a creature going, but either failed sadly (á la getting the video to record anything on Prime), or couldn't be doing with the maintenance.

Until this week, when I discovered Bloglines, a most simple and lovely no-brainer, web-based (no downloads), free aggregator that, overnight, changed my web habits.

Once signed in to the site, you can go through their huge list of blogs and websites (166,814 when I last looked, organised by name, popularity, new offerings etc - "top blogs" is a good place to start - and pick and choose what you fancy.

It's not all blogs, there's everything from the New York Times to Wired News, Peanuts cartoons to MacRumors too.

You end up with your very own My Blogs page, which is split in two. On one side is a list of all the sites to which you have subscribed. Any with new content (and they check for updates hourly) are highlighted.

Click on the link and lo - on the right is a brief summary of the new content, much of which you will ignore, swiftly scrolling through. But click on an item that catches the eye, and a new window opens, taking you to the full version.

Even if your favourite sites don't have RSS feeds, they probably have mailing lists (with site news, updates etc), to which you probably subscribe using an account with Yahoo! or Hotmail or the like. Now you can subscribe to those mailing lists through special Bloglines email accounts, and they will appear on your My Blogs page with your RSS subscriptions.

At last, everything in one place. At last, the ability to search the web while you sleep.

There are other cool features and tricks I've yet to learn. Luckily, the good folk at LawLibTech can be bothered, so head to their fine Bloglines tutorial for a proper how-to, though the site is so simple that even I managed to figure it out solo.

Happily, I haven't been too busy Bloglining to search out a couple of daft sites worth having morning tea with. The Candy Wrapper Museum is a classic piece of net/collector madness set up by one who has been collecting lolly wrappers (both classic and more mundane, "for posterity's sake") since 1977.

There are photos of some very odd stuff, like sweets presented in match-book packaging and some fiendishly disguised as a cheque book.

While on the subject of nice things to eat, here's an idea for an unusual gift: personalised chocolate. Albany outfit Chocolate Graphics make choccies and brand them with an edible message, design or logo of your choice - you can even get a favourite photo chocolatised! Brilliant.

And so is the idea of giving the gift that keeps on flying. How about mail-order butterflies?

The Butterfly Company specialises in the supply of live monarch butterflies for release at weddings and events, anywhere in New Zealand (November to May). You can also "send a chrysalis" in a nice box. Cute.

After reading that the butterflies are not harmed in any way, and that the packaging "will keep your butterflies calm and cool in the hottest of summer conditions while in transit", it is a little disconcerting to discover that they also sell mounted butterfly and insect displays. Beautiful, but so dead.

* Email Shelley Howells