Second Links News, An Excellent RSS-Powered SL Portal

Here's an elegantly designed portal of metaverse news created by Kate Amdhal, the winged avatar who's savvy with RSS.  Drawing from a copious list of Second Life blogs,  Second Links displays the blogs with newest content up top; you can also filter out SL blogs you're not interested in according to category.  A couple dozen SL blogs are featured on her portal, selected accordion smart criterion:

"They're usually updated at least once a week," Ms. Amdahl explains, "They're about aspects of Second Life itself, not about the daily adventures of a particular Resident (daily adventures are fine! but they aren't news or commentary per se) or promotional blogs for a certain store, etc.  They've been going consistently for at least a few months.  They're mainly or entirely about Second Life."  Finally, she adds, acknowledging this is a subjective category,"They're well-written and have interesting or informative things to say."

I'm sorely tempted to replace Bloglines with Kate's solution.

Comments

[Morris Vig]

Hamlet - Anyone can do this with Netvibes.com. In fact, you can take this concept even further with tabbed pages. Here's my SL Netvibes page, open to the public for review of the many blogs that I'm tracking... http://www.netvibes.com/morrisvig

[pri]

I don't really prefer sites accepts only an English content. Being a European and it is a fact that most of the Europeans speak more than one language, why should we stick at English content always. Those sites are published on that listing is well-known for everyone who is quite familiar with SL issues. Moreover most of the ppl in SL are from EU speak different languages which might require content other than in English. Mentioning some words about the page itself, it is a minimal designed site without using any design concept which is required to be a professional.

[Kate Amdahl]

Hamlet, thank you for spreading the news! Um, so to speak.

Morris, NetVibes looks really neat, and seems like a good tool if you already know all of the sources you want to look at, are interested in maintaining them yourself, don't need to hide categories, and don't prefer the most recent information popping to the top. And it seems that it would be especially appealing if you don't like the blogs and news sources I picked. :)

Pri, I'm sorry you don't like the site. I think you're quite right about the need for more materials for Europeans, but while I speak a bit of several European languages, I don't speak enough to be able to search out and vet non-English-language sites. If anyone who does would like to help out by managing lists of sites in other languages - and let's not forget Japanese, Thai, Arabic and others! I would love to host a World Second Life Resources page, but I really don't have the expertise to edit it myself. At the moment all I'm doing is noting a few pages in the blogroll that are in different languages. I do have a few such pages listed there.

"it is a minimal designed site without using any design concept which is required to be a professional."

Well, I'm certainly no graphic artist! If anyone has suggestions for improvements, I would love to hear them.

But I hope you're not saying that a minimal design is an unprofessional design? That would make the staff of Google very sad!

^^^\ Kate /^^^

[Corcosman Voom]

I like the design of Kate's site. Easy to get around and informative.

[Anonymus-Not]

First of all, this is not against the mentioned page which is usable even for me until i feed my netvibes from its links.

This is rather against how things go around SL... that blogs write about things as news or sensations while they are nothing new or sensation... just...

a lot of people came/come from 'outside', who know nothing or very little about where IT is nowadays and moreover where it has been in the years before.

In SL... oftentimes, people praise things based on eye-candy and wow-factor, unaware that similar things exist or rather has existed for a long time, vastly surpassing their sl counterparts both techincally and idea-wise.

Also the same lack of technical knowledge or should i say ignorance and yearn for eye-candy is present inworld too... this is what drives people to create 200 prim airships, selling it later on slex for thousands just to see them unlink on border crossing or fill up their sims with network-hogging 1024^2 textures and particle emitters without any kind of optimization.

Then they came with screenshots heavily manipulated, deceiving people.

Lindens should wake up and really try to help the builders who -- to be honest -- are not 'game' designers themselves and mostly arrive without an understanding of the underlying workings.

Also, lindens should introduce the preload-teleport concept that would load the contents of the targeted sim before arrival or maybe even before initiating teleport.

Argh. im ranting. and im offtopic. i have so many ideas, but... ...... .....

..this will prolly be deleted anyway...

[Kedawen Darrow]

This is a wonderful resource for keeping up on everything that goes on in the wide world of Second Life!! I especially like the blogroll section, because I love reading people's personal stories and adventures.

As a graphic designer by trade, I think it looks pretty darn good! Its main function is to display a lot of information and it does that very well. My only suggestion would be to create a header that would extend across the whole page, perhaps.

Great job Kate!

[Opensource Obscure]

Here is a list of SL-related english RSS feeds (it's an OPML file you will import into your aggregator/feed reader):
http://drop.io/slfeeds

Also, I am using Yahoo Pipes to make a RSS feed that aggregates all italian SL websites that provide a feed:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=404934830a3e120ab2f17df269135274