Vanessa Fox. Nude.

I know. It is hard to wrap your mind around. The idea of reading blogs without a feed reader is crazy, right? Who would do that? Nobody but a crazy person, that’s who. RSS has made it so easy to read blogs. You can skim, read what you want, click over (or not). What’s not to like?

Well, a few things.

Some bloggers would prefer you read their posts on their sites (for lots of different reasons: so you will see what the rest of their sites have to offer; so you can experience their writing in its original brilliantly styled layout; because you might click on the ads…) and so they supply only partial feeds. And apparently some blog readers prefer to read posts on the original sites as well. (OK, one one blog reader. Sorry I called you crazy before!)

If you are a crazy non-RSS type reader, you can just bookmark all the sites you like, maybe put the bookmarks in a folder, then open all in tabs or click through them one by one. I don’t know really. I’m not the lone crazy, so you’ll have to ask him how he does it.

If you subscribe to partial RSS feeds, then you can do as I do and go through them in your feed reader then open the ones you want to read through in tabs. (If you don’t use a tabbed browser, I’m assuming you mostly cry.)

But is there another way?

There’s always another way.

You could try Nibelung. Nibelung is an old school webring system from way before the days of RSS. I used it years ago when blogs were still called online journals. (If you’re too young to remember those days, please don’t tell me. I feel old enough as it is.) You just add all the sites you read, then next through them. The entire site loads up in a frame. You can scroll through the site, navigate through it, and yes, click on the ads if you’d like. When you’re ready for the next site, just click the next link. It looks a little like this:

Here, try it out.

The one loony reader may find it helpful, but if you’re a reader of partial feeds, you may find it helpful too. You could put all your partial feeds in one ring and then just click through them and read the articles all in one fell swoop rather than the schizophrenic method I use of reading the partial part of each feed, then going back and reading the rest of each feed in all my open tabs (at some point during the day, or possibly week).

So what’s the downside? Well, if you use it for the partial feeds trick then you’ve got to do your blog reading in two different places and you probably have things categorized so that might be a bit clumsy. And Nibelung isn’t all that full-featured, so for instance, if you want to organize things into categories, you have to create separate rings. And you have to be public about your email address, although if you hide your ring, your email stays hidden as well.

And Nibelung has been around for years but isn’t all that high-traffic, so it’s not set up to take a heavy load. If you all start using it, we might have to lobby the owner to move it to a more robust server and whip up some features. I’m sure if we asked nicely we could work something out.