The Downside of RSS

Here's a little story of something that's happened recently.  In the end, it goes mostly to making sure that the webmaster of the sites did his homework, but maybe I'm supposed to remember things better, I don't know.

So, as I mentioned in the blog post about the ILikeAndy.com T-shirt, I enjoy Andy Osenga and his music.  I've also loved reading his blog over the last couple years in addition to his music.  He's one of my favorite bloggers.  But what I found while writing that story was that I've not been reading his blog for the last six months!

How does this happen?  Well, I've just been reading his blog via the RSS feed in my Google Reader, so I haven't been visiting his site.  However, about six months ago, he got a new site, and the new site's RSS feed was not the same.  Google Reader doesn't notify me of this, so I probably at first assumed that Andy was too busy to blog and then forgot about his blog completely.

The great thing is that Google Reader keeps track of what's new for me.  Google doesn't usually screw up, but what happens when the webmaster forgets a little detail like that?  I miss six months of content and have to spend a couple hours on a Saturday catching up.  Should I be checking people's actual sites more often?  I hope not - there's way too many sites that I follow via RSS to do that.

I guess the moral of the story is to make sure that you're not missing anything that's important to you on the 'net.  Unless you're a webmaster, in which case, you should make sure you got your stuff together.  And speaking of which, I gotta go manage some sites.

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