DrunkenBlog

RSS thoughts

I hate spending my entire day on the phone.

When there is a problem, and you're point on the team, one of the biggest drags are when the people on your team are constantly calling for updates. The more people on the team, the worse it is. You can say "I'll email you when I have more information" but, for whatever reason it just doesn't go that way.

You end up spending your day unable to get into any sort of groove at all, because the damn phone is ringing every 15 minutes on average and ruining your concentration. If you're lucky, you get concentrated packets of calls, which mean you just lose a few hours. And these particular people are just a lil outta control on it.

It's driving me batty. It's just too inefficient. I'm fine with inefficient, if its a conscious, intentional choice over efficiency, but in this case its not, and I'm getting kinda snippy. It's not that I hate the phone- if I'm in "phone mode" I don't really care. When I'm in concentrate mode, it's a drag. When I'm in "brainstorming mode" I'm dangerous...

I'm wondering if RSS feeds might help a little, feeds sure do make my day a lot simpler and efficient when it comes to certain things, and I have been pushing them pretty hardcore. (As an aside, yay! tomservo added trackbacks and an rss feed! of course not having trackback links on the individual article pages means I have to go to the article, then back to the main website to grab the trackback ping) You could make a case that I'm getting addicted to them in my workflow. I love them.

But maybe I'm heavily addicted to them and the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" might be applying. IE, I can see a lot of ways where RSS/XML feeds could be way more efficient for status updates on various things, especially when data was pushed (like pings)...

But:

• Human factors
  If you can't get people to actually view their email as the werd on status updates, instead of calling, it may be doubtful that they'll view RSS feeds differently. There might be some benefit from how inundating email can be now- I know I have moved some email updates I used to get to RSS feeds, and at the end of my day, even though I may be waiting for an email, sometimes I can dread opening up my email app simply because of everything else I might have to deal with.
• Mobile devices
  I'm unaware of any RSS/XML feed apps for the various mobile devices out there: phones, pda's, etc. Which isn't to say they don't exist, I'm just unaware of them. Feeds would be awesome for these, especially the simpler RSS. Hunting down that info would be a drag.
• Security
  It isn't as though this project is under lock & key, with gpg-encrypted email going back and forth or something. But generally you're talking IMAP over SSL, but even with straight POP3 with everything over cleartext is prolly more secure than having www.mycompany.com/status/horribleshowstoppingbugs.rdf out there for spiders to pick up. Prolly not something you'd want people googling on, but I'm not aware of any client that allows you to say, grab a feed from behind an .htaccess-protected page. That'd be cool.
• Various windows clients
  I use OSX, by and large, and really don't have a good handle on the various windows feed readers out there. I'm assuming they're out there, and I know of a good web-based aggregator, but I'd want to have some decent software recommendations in my stable before I pushed something. And finding 'em would be a drag.

Ah well. I'll keep my eye out for others looking at doing the same thing, and see if anything turns up. Bah.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 27, 2004, at 04:04 AM