Boston Herald RSS Feeds

It is always fun to see something come full circle, even if it takes half of a lifetime.

Way back in 1972 or so, I was 12 years old and living in Framingham, Massachusetts. Somehow (the details escape me at the moment) I became the proud operator of a small paper route. I would get up at 5 AM 7 days a week, get dressed, push my bike up the driveway to the street, and find my daily pack of papers. They were secured with a wire, and I had a pair of wire cutters stashed near our mailbox so that I could cut the wire, load the papers into my bag, and pedal off to deliver my 15 or so copies of the Boston Herald Traveler. I had a long route, probably 2 miles or so. I do remember stopping to read the front of each section; this was probably the start of my career as a news junkie, and in some way led to my interest in RSS and syndicated content.

Since I only had 15 papers to deliver I didn’t keep any paper accounting records; most everyone paid me each week and it was easy enough to remember the 1 or 2 customers who hadn’t paid from week to week. I wasn’t one of those entrepreneurial types who started small and then grew the route to a gargantuan size. My job, as I understood it, was to get people their papers before they were awake, and I did my best to do this.

So, where am I going with this? Glad you asked!

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg noted that the Boston Herald (the Traveler suffix was dropped a while ago, according to the Wikipedia article) now has a bunch of blogs and RSS feeds.

I have added all of the feeds to Syndic8, which means that, 34 years later, I am still helping (in a small way) to deliver the Boston Herald Traveler. Its a lot easier this time, but somehow I am still doing that same job, but in a different way!