Having recently re-added the books/movies I’ve seen recently (in the “***Recently” sidebar), I’m now also adding the most recent wines consumed via an RSS feed I get from CellarTracker and a clever little sidebar RSS widget from SpringWidgets, by way of FeedBurner (though it doesn’t require FeedBurner).
So now whenever I post a review of something I pull from my cellar, you can see it here, woo-woo. Click on the title (CellarTracker) to get summary reviews of all, or on any of the individual wines to see the details.
I’m not wild about the SpringWidgets Flash widget, but it looks a bit less unattractive than what Grazr offers, and even though I have the feed already showing up in the sidebar via Google Reader, I can’t quite figure out how to get Google Reader to display it.
It’s interesting — I’m trying to turn this page more and more into sort of an aggregation portal for what I browse, read, see, and now drink, rather than relying on static links and blog posts. I have specialized ElseBlog items, the Google Reader shared items (Unblogged Bits), my Recently “wishlist” from Amazon via Dealazon, and now this feed via SpringWidgets. All of which are meant to save me having to write added blog posts about stuff if I don’t have the time or inclination — the Lazy Man’s way of blogging, I suppose.
I think SpringWidget is meant as either (a) an easy RSS feed aggregator for folks to post on their blog (or even their desktop), or (b) a cheap way to publicize one’s site (“Hey, get the SpringWidget for my site!”). I think it makes a reasonable aggregator for my own personal feeds.
Though … all this stuff has gotten a lot easier, but nobody has a complete model — something that will take any source and spit it out in any other format without wrapping all sorts of crap around it (as even SpringWidget does). The things I can do with Google Reader come close — but, as SpringWidget shows, even there I can’t easily grab the contents of a single feed and share them in my sidebar — and the shared “clip” like I do with Unblogged Bits has serious formatting limitations.
On the other hand … I can do a lot more of this sort of thing than I could when the blog started (both personally, in my level of “expertise,” and in what the Net provides in the way of services). Which is kinda cool …