This is from the latest Tux Magazine,

“Most of us like spending some time studying the Internet for our daily dose of information. Yet easy access to information becomes a slippery slope, consuming time and efficiency. Internet browsers enable reckless web exploring and can be addictive time killers. Ten years ago, this was hardly a concern. Everyone read newspapers conveniently organized into sections of interest. So, paper kept the allure of information surfing minimized.

Today, using the Firefox browser to inject your brain with a daily dose of news is often fatal to productivity. You read a story with two embedded links and unwittingly find you have visited five more stories before you’re aware of the time!”

The article goes on to talk about RSS as being the cure to this problem. I suffer badly from this. Distractions! I go online to do a certain task then I check my email. Big mistake. I visit a few web pages and I might find something interesting to blog about then read some more emails and visit any interesting links I find there and before I know it several hours have gone by and I still haven’t done the original thing I set out to do 🙂

The article also explains to people how to use a news aggregator.

I will have to try using Liferea news aggregator more and see if this does help fix the problem…. ha ha somehow I don’t think so.

Anyway this was a good article. If you know any Linux newbies who don’t read it I’d encourage them to start also I’ve got back copies on CD, which I was giving away at Software Freedom Day, if anyone would like one.

Tux Magazine, rss feeds