I got me a virus

It's been a few days since my last post, and I think it's mostly blogging's fault. You see, from the time of my first post I've been absolutely obsessed with finding good blogs to read, reading blogs, and writing in my own. Please understand, I'm probably one of the least obsessive people you will ever meet (even virtually). I can't remember ever being so consumed with something until this.
One result of this unexpected compulsion has been a lack of sleep - way too many late, late nights. I held up all right until last week when school started. Ouch. Late, late nights and the sudden early, early mornings caught up with me and kicked my tail on Thursday. See the rubber band on the balsa-wood airplane - it's all wound up tight, right? Well, that's what happened to my stomach and I'm just now getting over it. Ugh. I guess I need to find a way to find/read/write and still get a little sleep as well.

While I'm at it, I thought I'd share a few of the tools I've found which have helped with the finding and reading. Now if I could just find something to help with the writing!

First, I finally figured out what the buzz was about regarding RSS. I've very quickly found that blogs that don't support RSS/Atom get forgotten about. I'm currently using Sage with Firefox to manage my blogroll and easily see which ones have new posts ready for me to read. When I run across a blog that looks like it's worth a 2nd read, I just click the little orange icon in the address bar and add it to my sage bookmarks. Sometimes, the icon doesn't show up, so I can then use Sage to "discover feeds" on the site for me. On a way-too-regular basis, I click "check feeds" in Sage to see which blogs have new posts. I'd love to say that this tool has saved me a bunch of time, but it really has just allowed me to spend more time reading more blogs.

On the finding side, I really haven't found any decent blog search tools. I've found most of my favorites by clicking through the Autism Bloggers ring. Likewise, I read through the comments and click on the reader's name to check out their blogs. Doing so has led me to many great blogs outside of the autism blog spectrum :)

Lastly, I'm just now playing with del.icio.us so that I can keep (and add to) the various lists on my page in a more synchronized fashion, without having to edit HTML (as often).

OK, this is really the last one. I've found Adrian's notes on blogging to be very useful and easy to put into place.

That's it - I have to go to bed! Really!
Oh no, I just clicked "check feeds". Why did I do that? Maybe I'll just read one more...