I have an opinion or three on technological matters. And since I can make this here blog do whatever I want, this here blog now has a Technology section. You're reading its first entry.

My RSS feed reader of choice is rss2email. It turns RSS and Atom news items into email messages, which for humans makes an extraordinary amount of intuitive sense. Why? The typical RSS feed provides news items with authors, titles, dates, and content. Typical email messages have the same properties.

Mozilla Thunderbird has a reasonably nice built-in reader that also makes RSS look a lot like email. Nathan prefers it to rss2email because of the way it handles feeds with incomplete content (which are more prevalent than they ought to be). The drawbacks are that you have to use Thunderbird (of course) and that your RSS news items can't be viewed or managed in other ways.

Well, I've been storing all my email on my server with IMAP for the past 5 years or so, and am far too accustomed to being able to get at it in N different ways from wherever I happen to be. I expect the same from my RSS subscriptions. So I run rss2email on my server, from cron, with each feed's news items going to a unique email address that's filtered into the right IMAP folder. Then my RSS news items are there whenever I want to read them — whether I'm at a wireless hotspot with my PowerBook and Mail.app, or on a Columbia lab machine with mutt via SSH, or in Florence at a locked-down kiosk where it's webmail or bust.

rss2email also makes a handy gateway from RSS feeds (which savvy users grok) to mailing lists (which everyone's parents already understand). I use it in this capacity, too, for my photos and for the College and Travel sections of this blog.

The moral of the story: why go hunting for a separate RSS application when my email program can be applied to the problem? With my existing finger habits, it's so easy to delete RSS threads I don't care about (which is generally most of them) that I'm able to follow a couple hundred feeds. Really! Which is supercool, because staying this well informed is something I couldn't otherwise do.

Now it's easy. Isn't that what technology is for?