I’m a believer

I currently have 59 feeds in my OPML file. 4 of those are planet feeds with x number of feeds each, so the total is easily over 100. If I don’t catch up with my feeds every day or so, I soon get overwhelmed and end up marking a batch as read without even looking at them. To make sure I wasn’t letting them pile up I was reading them far too many times a day.

Many, many places covered how Scoble reads over 600 feeds a day, and I ignored it at first. Then more sites covered it, and I started thinking about my own feed reading habits and decided to follow Hackzine’s advice:

OK so I didn’t start wearing my underpants on the outside to satisfy the last one, but the rest did help. Instead of reading my feeds in their categories with the list view (and using a mouse!), viewing all items in the expanded view and relying on the keyboard makes getting through my feeds a breeze. I now set aside a block of time a day to catch up on feeds and have them done in record time.

One tip not covered by Scoble is the use of starring, or rather how I use them. Instead of following links whilst I’m reading, I star an item I want to follow up on and come back to them later (remembering to remove the star when I’m done. If the feed item is just a stub to the real thing, I’ll open it in a new tab in the background (yay Firefox!) and move on, only moving away from Google Reader when I’m done.

The other tip I picked up from Scoble is to share items, which works really well when combined with the Google Reader Shared Items Facebook app.

Sworn in the USA

I had a flash of inspiration about how the sworn in the USA tagline could look as a logo, and so decided to try it out.

If you want to use them, help yourself:

Here’s the source if you think it can be improved:

As before, these images and source file are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Attribution should be done by either my name (David Murphy) or nick (schwuk) and a link back to this entry (preferable) or this site. If you can’t abide by the license, don’t use the files.

Bring it on

Yes, that’s my handiwork. So is the tagline sworn in the USA. I also suggested the land of the chin and home of the beard, but sworn is better.

No idea if I will get to LRLUSA’08, or even if it will be as good as the originals but the simple fact that a drunken idea has managed to spawn a popular podcast, an annual event and now an international event deserves to be recognised.

For the record the logo was created in Inkscape, and if you wish to pimp LRLUSA’08 yourself, you can grab some images here:

If you want to do some remixes – I’m sure the LugRadio boys will appreciate it – here’s the source:

Unlike the rest of this site, these images and source file are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Attribution should be done by either my name (David Murphy) or nick (schwuk) and a link back to this entry (preferable) or this site. If you can’t abide by the license, don’t use the files.

As Aq. rightly points out, these need to allow commercial use so that they can use them to promote LRLUSA’08 in good faith. Therefore I have revised the license under which they are made available (this is why Creative Commons is so good). I could have given the LRL guys separate permission, but this way is cleaner.

Got to catch them all

I’ve updated my contact details with the (re-added) Twitter, as well as adding Ponce Pownce and Jaiku. If you’re using any of these and want to add me, feel free.

A Fresh Cup

Last night, thanks to Twitter, I got to renew a acquaintance with Mike Gunderloy (I was a big fan of his books Coder To Developer and Developer To Designer). I used to follow his Daily Grind blog as it was widely regarded as the source for Microsoft Windows related development news, but as my interest in the topic waned I dropped it from my regular reading.

Fast forward to yesterday when Mike added me as a friend in Twitter, I discovered his new (to me) site A Fresh Cup which both charts his transition to Ruby on Rails (and an Apple platform) and serves as a Rails version of the Daily Grind.

Mike’s tale is very interesting to me, especially having made the transition myself (albeit to Python, but I went via Rails and intend to revisit it soon), and I think it might inspire some others too. For obvious reasons I’d like to have seen Mike move to Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) but, as I was discussing with Josette (from O’Reilly) and Tony (whilst convincing him to get a Rails book) at the weekend, Rails and Macs still seem to go hand-in-hand so Mike’s choice was a natural one.

Oh, and Mike is using the same platform for his new site as I use here – Mephisto.

Chewing the fat

After dropping a couple of social networks, then being invited I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, mainly about the value in ‘broadcast’ mechanisms like Twitter and Ponce Pownce. This train of thought lead me into a chat with the-man-that-needs-no-microphone Nik Butler, who is a big fan of social networking (both on- and off-line).

As these sorts of chats are want to do, we did stray quite far from the topic of social networks, but as well as putting the world to rights he did make me appreciate some of the benefits that can be gained from putting the effort into using these sites. This, coupled with the realisation at several points through the day that there were things that I would like to broadcast, but didn’t warrant a full post here has led me to re-register with Twitter.

I’m hesitant to commit to too many networks though – having to maintain a status in Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter and Ponce Pownce is straining. Ideally I’d like to be able to edit one (or any) of them and have the others reflect that. I use Gaim Pidgin because I want my IM in one place¹. I use a feed reader so that I don’t have to go to different places to get content. How long before there is combined client for social networks?

Although I have U-turned with Twitter I stand by my decision to drop MySpace, although my decision had nothing to with class. Quite simply it had almost no value for me in return for maintaining.

¹ Although I had to fire up another application to be able to have the chat with Nik.

Poncing about

Yesterday I dropped two social networking sites from my collection. In a “everything happens for a reason” way I received an invite to Pownce this morning, which I accepted without really thinking about it.

A minor digression – I get that you can’t launch a new brand these days without savaging the English language, and I also get that they’re trying to do a play on the word pounce but no matter how hard I try I keep reading and pronouncing it as ‘ponce’ which is:

…which, for me, ruins the branding.

First impressions matter. In the few hours I’ve been registered Ponce Pownce has been down more than it has been up – or at least every time I’ve tried to access it. I managed to get registered and add the one person I knew who used it, but that is it.

…which for me, ruins the experience.

Seeing as I couldn’t actually use it, and I didn’t really understand (I did say I accepted the invite without thinking) what problem they were trying to solve – apart from taking on Twitter – I started doing some research. Tony Hung has summarised my findings quite succinctly, which reminded me of why I signed up for Twitter in the first place – being able to, er, twitter from my phone or IM.

This, to me, is far more valuable than the prettiest site design in the world. Until Ponce Pownce (or Jaiku) offer both these methods then they’re lagging behind. Sure it would be great if Twitter had sets, and being able to add events and files to Pownce is a nice feature (although events are better served by something like upcoming or meetup). Of these, sets is the only killer feature over Twitter and that’s ruined by being forced to use the website (or their ‘desktop’ client which I can’t use since Adobe’s interpretation of cross platform is as bad as Microsoft’s).

Official Ubuntu Book 2nd Edition

News is starting to filter through¹ that the second edition of the Official Ubuntu Book has now been released².

Although my work has been published before, this is the first time I’ve been credited as an author. It is a pretty exciting experience! Writing the book was fun and I learned a lot, both about writing and Ubuntu, whilst doing it. I do have some other projects still in the pipeline, but I hoping there will be a third edition…

Update

I’ve now received my complimentary copies.

¹ I know I’m playing catchup, but I was busy at the weekend!

² There seems to be some disparity in the publication dates given by Prentice Hall, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, but some of the other authors have got their copies so if it’s not out yet it certainly will be soon.

Trimming the fat

After announcing which social networking sites I was using, I’ve now dropped two: MySpace and Twitter.

Both sites I joined on a whim – I only personally knew one or two people on each, and I’ve not invested much time in growing my networks on either. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that a) I wasn’t exploring the potential of either, but more importantly b) I had no interest in doing so.

MySpace

Although I enjoy music, I don’t feel the need to have the bands I listen to as ‘friends’. I feel it far more worthwhile to indicate my appreciation for a particular artist by actually, you know, listening to them so Last.fm is a far better fit for this.

In addition, with only one or two exceptions none of my real friends can be found on there so it’s use for actual networking is pretty limited.

Twitter

I liked the idea, but I can’t remember exactly why I signed up. Whatever goals they had in mind, I’ve only found it to be a poor mans Instant Messenger. I found a few twitters actually interesting (and in one case even profitable) but the vast majority fell into the categories of:

I think the problem here is that Twitter is push-based, whilst I prefer to choose what I want to consume and more importantly how.

Certain features were cool, like being able to ‘twitter’ from my mobile (at no cost).

Delete, not discard

I could have simply stopped using both services, but I decided to take the step of actually deleting my accounts. If I find I miss them or I discover a compelling reason to use them then I may re-create them. Until then, I’ve got two less distractions to worry about.

Me too!

LugRadio Live 2007.

Enough said.

Stop reading this and make your way to Wolverhampton.