I've been using RSS feeds for several years now and find them incredibly useful for keeping up to date with blogs and news sites. However, today I was talking to another web developer who said that he hates RSS feeds and would much rather have email updates when a site gets updated rather than having to add an RSS feed to his email client.

Now I wouldn't find this strange coming from a lot of people as I can understand that a lot of people have no idea about RSS and would get confused trying to work out what an aggregator is. But from a web developer? Come on! If the people that develop websites with RSS can't even be bothered to use it then what chance is there of the general populous using it?

I use mac mail to manage all of my RSS feeds and find that it does a fairly good job - everything gets synced over to my iPhone as well so I can keep up to date when I'm on the train etc. I also have a few RSS feeds on my iGoogle homepage so I can see the latest xkcd or dilbert strip whilst I'm pretending to work. Now I'm fairly sure you can set Outlook up to receive RSS feeds - so why doesn't this developer do that? Apparently, if Windows were to crash (unlikely but stay with me on this) then he would lose all of the RSS feeds he was tracking and therefore have to add them again so it's not worth doing. "You could use Google Reader or any other number of online aggregators" say I. "Too much effort" says he. I give up.

So, in the next day or so there will be a "sign up" button on this site so that those of you who can't be bothered with RSS can get email alerts when a new message is posted. I've also set up a twitter account which will be syndicating the posts on this site as and when they happen - the account to follow is bendodson_com. Oh, and for those of you that have moved into the 21st century, here is the good old RSS feed.