Erik Marshall

If you look at the bottom right of the sidebar, you’ll see a little widget with red and yellow icons, which contains recently updated posts from a few other blogs. That’s feevy, a promising technology that lets you include a dynamically updated RSS feed blogroll. It supports tags, multiple feevies for different categories/users, etc, but it is far from perfect. Here are some problems and suggestions for this new service:

• Feevy retrieves blog titles automatically, but not always accurately. For example, it retrieved The Pinocchio Theory as something like “Thepinocchiotheoryingmarbergman…”, combining the title of the blog and the first entry it found and some other words. The ability to edit titles would be very helpful
• You can choose an icon for each feed, but they’re just little icons of poeople in four different colors. You can add your own image, but it would be nice if it would retrieve the favicon, or support gravatars, automatically.
• It took me awhile to figure this out, but you can’t put in the RSS feed for the site. You have to put the actual blog address. Better documentation/instructions would be nice
• Automatic importing from OPML files or WordPress Blogroll would rock. I don’t feel like going through and adding each link manually

Again, this seems like a cool service that will allow me (and you) to look at my blog and see snippets of recent updates from select blogs. I have a plan for this site that includes building a film/media studies portal at the root, including RSS feeds and the like. Once it matures, this may be a useful tool in that project. For now, it will sit on the bottom of my sidebar.