Aggregating your hometown

My first-thing-in-the-morning routine has always consisted of moving among a bunch of programs. They’re probably the same as yours: email, news aggregator, calendar, web browser, todo lists. We all have our favorite morning news sites, comics, sports schedule, forums, etc. to check up on. It’s like this crazy tidal wave of information you have to deal with — and all before you start your actual work.

One way I was able to save a bunch of effort in the morning was paring down the number of changes in attention. In other words, if I eliminated one program from the mix, it seemed to help out my focus. In my case, I tried to nix the browser.

RSS and other news feeds, in the context of news aggregator programs, have really done wonders for tracking hundreds of sites every day with a fraction of the effort formerly required. (They have added another layer of distraction, which is yet another reason why I hide my Dock. :)

Obviously, you want to subscribe to feeds whenever possible, to reduce the number of websites you absolutely need to monitor get distracted by every half-hour. But there are some other, just-once-a-day things you probably do, that can also be farmed out. Does your local newspaper have an RSS feed? If you live in the bigger cities, sure. But what about the smaller burgs?

Google News has a handy feature within its keyword news search that can help you out. Type in the local paper’s name into the form, and hit Search News. Let’s say it’s the East Hartford Gazette, in East Hartford, Connecticut. If you go to their website, you’ll find there is no obvious RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to. Bummer if you want to check the East Hartford news every day!

However, if you do that Google News Search for East Hartford Gazette, voila: local news! What’s the big deal, you say? Just another webpage! Au contraire — check out the lefthand sidebar on that search results page. RSS and Atom feeds for that very search.

Now any time Google News picks up an East Hartford Gazette story, it’ll show up in your aggregator. If you have a distinctive enough hometown name — like, say, Waxahachie TX, or if you don’t mind the occasional mismatch, you could also use the city name by itself to get your local news, not to mention find stories about your hometown from other newspapers.

Expanding that concept, you can do searches for other topics, like the one I have for the Dodgers.

Not only have I cut down the morning browsing to a couple of web-based reports, I’m actually aggregating way more news about my hometown and my favorite sports teams than I was before, thanks to Google News.

One thing I have noticed — stories tend get repeated as Unread some times, or are minorly updated throughout the day. Set the refresh rate for that feed to something longer, like every 8 hours, to minimize the problem.