Poll

Participating in Blog the Recession has made me think about the role of RSS and how people use it, in part because of this article, which I read when I was prepping that post. I didn't actually get everything in the article, but it did get me curious.

I've had a site feed on here pretty much since the start but, to be perfectly honest, I never really understood what the hell it did until relatively recently. I never signed up for Bloglines or Google Reader (you may remember I was not a Google fan in general for quite a while) so I never actually used anyone's RSS feed and I didn't think much about whether people were using mine. It was there and some people seemed to like it; win-win, story over.

I have never claimed to be an HTML code guru. That would be like claiming I'm a master chef -- I can cook, sure, but no one will ever pay me to do it and few seek out my advice. When it comes to making things work here at the Ping, beyond the standard Blogger template, I've either figured it out, had help or let it go. Anything you see here (including the ability to subscribe to my RSS feed) is the result of cobbling together what people have done for me and what I've been able to pick up along the way because I will chase down "how to" on the Web like a bloodhound on the scent until my eyes cross.

Why am I telling you all this? Two reasons, actually; it is both 1) the reason for the poll that I'd like to have you take part in, and 2) the reason that poll is not actually on this page. I simply can't figure out how to get the code to work within Blogger, but I was able to make it work on a page from my very old Yahoo! GeoCities site (go figure) and then point you to it.

Without further ado: I'm curious. How do you access your favorite blogs? The poll will be active for one week and is open to anyone, including those people who ended up here because they were searching for something related to The Hunt for Red October and got here instead! It's simple, it's fast, it's anonymous and I'm asking nicely. Please? Thanks.