I’ve been on the internet for as long as I can remember. My first web browser didn’t know what a graphic was, the computer had no mouse and the connection speed was slower than my iPhone with 1 bar of service. Fast forward some 15+ years and the internet has become a major hobby of mine as well as my source for 99% of the news and information I take in.
I gave up print media, specifically newspapers, many years ago for their online versions. I found the on-screen text to be much larger than the print edition and that the black on white text was a much better fit for me than black on grey with smudges. I would frequent five or ten news oriented websites a day to take in my news on subjects from politics to technology and from sports to business news. However in roughly 2005 many sites began to mature in ways that I find counter-productive to their nature. Sites began to use very structured style sheets which allow them to fit more information and advertisements on a page; but they pay no mind to those of us who enjoy a larger font experience. I pretty well summarized my complaints in my October 1st, 2008 post here so I wont go on and on about it.
Thankfully around that time a new syndication method was becoming widely popular on the internet. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, puts all the updated content from a web site into a “feed” and allows the “reader” application to then view it in any way it wishes. RSS readers, whether online or as an application on your own computer usually offer you a lot more customization on features like font sizes and font families as well as whether you wish to see the included images or not.
With Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Livejournal and the numerous other personal blogs and blog hosting providers out there I have begone to run into the same issues I had of years ago with the news. The content was there, but often in a way I didn’t find it to be pleasant to read. Be it fonts that were too small, horrible choices of background images, themes that use horrible styling or just a poor choice of configuration I’ve come to the conclusion that these sites, jsut as the prior news sites, are not accessible for me. At first I didn’t know what to do about it. I ignored these sites for a long time however as they’ve become very popular, especially among the geeks of the world, I’ve been wanting to participate more and more.
Recently I spent quite some time with Google and found how to get all of my Social Media right into my RSS reader. Some of it was as easy as just adding the feed, others required third party sites to interact with private communities to get friend only posts and some just required me to open my eyes and notice links to RSS feeds. This has made my reading, following and staying in contact with friends much easier. Now, if I could easily design a single site with my parameters to make updates to these sites I’d be rocking out.
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