Hmm. I’ve aquired a few draft postings (ahh, the joys of a proper blogging tool), and I should get round to posting them. For the moment though, I’ll talk about something else.

I use Jabber for instant messaging, not MSN or ICQ or Yahoo or anything else. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since I’ve been having a problem with it for the last few weeks. Not long after I got back, the MSN transport that I was using seems to have packed up, and it hasn’t reappeared. Transports to proprietary networks (proprietary = bad, mkay?) aren’t exactly the most reliable of things anyway, as I’ve discussed previously, so it’s not all that surprising. And I’ve heard Microsoft have been messing around over the last few months trying to stop this kind of thing anyway. So recently, I’ve only been messaging other people on Jabber.

So really, I haven’t been using it for IM at all, since I don’t know anyone else who uses Jabber often. So why have I stuck to it? Stubbornness, mainly, with a bit of ideology thrown in. But there is one over-riding reason – it’s called JabRSS and it’s the perfect fusion of two high-geek-factor technologies. I’ve added 37 RSS (huh?) feeds to it, mainly blogs that I read. It then sends me a jabber message when they get updated – it sent 411 headlines in the last 7 days. So that saves me soooo much time trawling around the web checking for updated sites – the updates come to me, and I can see if I want to read the rest of the article in question. Nice. If you keep track of lots of sites, and especially if you swap between lots of computers (and therefore a dedicated RSS reader is a bit of a hassle), then I’d recommend it.

Anyway, today I managed to persuade someone (with no important sounding position ) to sign up to Jabber, so if you decide to do so, you’ll probably already know both of us. And for the foreseeable future, it’s about the only way you’re going to be able to message me. andrewjrallan@jabber.org is the jabberid to add to your contact list.

(And for those of you who are on my contact list but don’t use Jabber any more, I’m interested to know why you’ve stopped.)