RSS Addiction

Just last week I started using Google Reader. I had always seen the little orange symbols on blogs and webcomics, but I had never taken the time to figure them out. RSS? Atom? What? I hadn't felt a need to figure these out, and so I didn't bother.

I started reading webcomics a few years ago. It began with a single comic - xkcd. Once I had finished the xkcd archives and was at the point of waiting on updates, I was hungry for more. I found Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques (through Randall's "Comics I enjoy" paragraph at the bottom of his page), and Nothing Nice To Say by Mitch Clem (which I have no idea how I found). And when those archives were exhausted, I went on to find more comics. Fast forward to this summer, and I'm going crazy with the webcomics. My comic bookmarks have exploded to number more than 20, and I'm starting to forget which ones I have checked for updates and which ones I hadn't. Some of the comics update once a week, some twice a week, most three times a week, and others every day. And what if I accidentally missed an update! What then? Well, I would press the 'previous' button every time I checked for updates to make sure I hadn't missed any.

This process began to grow very tedious, and so I looked into something I had faintly heard of before - RSS readers. Satisfied with Google products, I checked out Google Reader. It was so easy to use! So simple to understand! I could drag and drop links from my bookmarks and there they would sit in my reader, just yearning to show off their updates to me. Gone were the days of trying to remember which comics were updated when, and gone were the worries of missing updates.

Unfortunately, this has recently grown into an addiction. Nowadays when I visit a webcomic or a weblog that I enjoy, or even just think I would enjoy, I'll add it to my reader. This creates a terrible feeling of hopelessness; I have 175 unread items, and they grow faster than I can read them. But that doesn't stop me from relentlessly hoarding more and more feeds. I mean, I could always unsubscribe if I wanted to.