Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Keeping online lives separate

Warning: This post might be boring for you if you don't use either an aggregator/feed reader or a Mac, but I've included some links and a little more explanation for those of you who otherwise wouldn't understand what in the world I'm talking about.

I am in need of some advice and new ideas for keeping my blog identity from interfering with my real one. For a long time now the number of blogs I read and comment on as my pseudonymous self greatly outnumbered those commented on by my real life persona, but these days a growing number of friends and family have blogs. I need to separate my selves.

Who else has to deal with this problem and how do you deal with it? Or maybe you just have two different gmail accounts that you use for different things? Essentially, what I need is a system for separating feeds from blogs that I comment on using two different gmail accounts.

I used to read blogs from the feed reader in Safari, but Safari started crapping out all the time. I switched to NetNewsWire, but for some reason it likes to communicate with Safari (which I still use for my realname Google calendar) and is always switching up the account I'm logged into.

I would also like to start using citation alerts via RSS (web feed) instead of email. Do you use this? Do you use the same application as you use for blogs?

Maybe I will switch to an in-browser feed reader like Google Reader and use different browsers for different accounts. My default is to always use FireFox for my pseudonymous self because Safari and Opera don't get along so well with Blogger in my experience.

On second thought, I probably don't want to use a web application (in the browser) for feeds because when I'm in Ukenzagapia I'll want to read them offline. I download my mail instead of using webmail for the same reason (I can't tell you how useful it is for me to be able to read and compose emails offline). I suppose I could try the feed reader in Mail (demo video link)- do any of my readers use this? If I use Mail I'm afraid I'll always be distracted by blogs because the unread ones show up like unread emails- bad for productivity.

Please help! What's your system?

2 comments:

dance said...

I have a Mac, NetNewsWire, AND multiple identities. Absolutely I have multiple emails and accounts---in fact, my real name has personal, business, and academic gmail accounts. But I don't comment many places as myself---most of the places where I engage are as pronetolaughter---so I don't quite run into your issue.

I don't know what you mean by NNW communicating with Safari, though. However, I almost NEVER log into a Google anything in the browser--perhaps if you start syncing the GCal with iCal?

You might look at NewsFire or something else, and have 1 RSS reader for the pseudonym, and another RSS reader for yourself.

sarcozona said...

Google reader has an offline option and it's my favorite rss reader.

My feeds are all collected under my real name, but I comment with my online identity on most blogs. I've run into trouble on some blogs where they don't allow comments with just a name & url, but usually they have an open ID option that you can use - I've set up an open ID with my blog name for those situations.