People often ask me where I find all of the silly and interesting things I post in the flotch. They also ask where I find the time to discover these links. The answer is simple: RSS.

Yesterday, Paul J. commented: There are days where I enjoy the flotch as much or more than your entries. I've wondered where you find these little nuggets o' gold. I also wonder where you find the time to find the little nuggets o' gold.

Dowingba got the answer partially correct: At least 50% of the flotch was discovered at kottke.org, methinks. Jason blogs for a living; that's how he finds all that crazy stuff.

While I get much less than 50% of my links from Kottke, I get many from sources just like him. Here's how it works:

I have an RSS reader (which is also called a newsreader). I've told this newsreader the address for all of my favorite sites: all of my friends' weblogs, all of the news sites I read, and, especially, all of the sites with fun and interesting links. The latter I've dubbed Link Farms, because that's all they really are. They're sites that each generate five to fifty links on various topics each day. When the newsreader checks a site and finds a new post, it grabs the post and converts it to a simple form (with no fancy layout, etc. — it's just the post).

Throughout the day, when I have time, I skim through the posts that the newsreader has gathered for me. "Oh, look: Lisa has posted a new entry about Albert. Lynn has actually updated her weblog! There's an interesting question over at AskMetafilter. Ha! A rant about Star Wars!"

If a particular post catches my eye in my newsreader, I can click a link to load the actual post in its native web site. The process is not complicated, nor is it time consuming; it only takes a bit of adjustment. It's a different way of working with the web.

So, where do I get all my links? I did a quick scan back through the last month worth of flotch, and tallied the results. I posted 102 links, or about three per day. I've been trying to cite my sources whenever possible. Often, I merely stumble upon interesting things via google or random web surfing. Other times, I'll see a link cited from several sources before I ever visit it. And, of course, I sometimes forget which site directed me to a link. I've lumped links from these three cases into a category called random, which is easily the largest source of links. (Ties are broken by how often I think I use the source.)

Flotch sources for the past month
58 random
11 Metafilter
5 friends (like you)
5 AskMetafilter
4 BoingBoing
3 Waxy
3 Kottke
3 Lifehacker
2 Robot Wisdom
2 Bifurcated Rivets
1 Slashdot
1 Making Light
1 43 Folders
1 What Do I Know
1 Defective Yeti
1 Mimi Smartypants

I'm almost certain that many of my RANDOM links are actually from Robot Wisdom. John is a prolific poster of interesting stuff. Other sources I use frequently (but which have not been cited in the past month) include: Ain't It Cool News, Memepool, and Ars Technica. There are dozens more feeds in my newsreader, but these are my main sources for links.

If you're interested in learning more about using RSS and newsreaders, do a little googling. Here's a brief intro to RSS. There's also an RSS Wikipedia article. None of that really matters, though. All that really matters is how to use it. Check here for a list of RSS readers for various computer platforms. (I use NetNewsWire.)

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — The Longest Day   Kris is exhausted. I'm exhausted. We're exhausted.