yelvington.com

I lost a lot of work in progress when my Compaq Evo laptop bit the dust, but the thing that has surprised me is how hard it's been to lose my RSS feeds. A key part of my job is keeping up with what's happening on the Internet, and suddenly I'm ... disconnected. Bam! Losing a couple of years' worth of email is hard; losing a huge list of RSS feeds turns out to be much harder.

I have an OPML file backed up ... from about a year ago. The best stuff came from the most recently added feeds. It's like losing part of your mind.

At a conference in pre-Katrina New Orleans, Nick Denton told me he has something like a thousand RSS feeds in his aggregator. Holy cow, I thought: That's not an aggregator, it's a lifestyle. Yeah. At some point I signed up for that lifestyle. Now I'm suffering withdrawal.