I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the new Google Reader Explore functionality. Some of the stuff might be interesting, but honestly it’s just another distraction that I don’t need.
Did anybody catch the new sorting features though? We’ve known that Google is magic for years. Apparently they’re now being public about it.
I’m a fan of Google Reader. I’ve written here before about their new improvements and how great it is to work in an iterative development area where improvements happen daily.
Even a great team has a failure once and a while. They recently added the ability to see your Google Talk Friend’s shared items within Google Reader. While this shows that Google has great plans for integrating their services, I’ve had problems with this feature right off the bat and from what I understand I’m not the only one.
My biggest problem was that the counter of unread items would go up but my ability to read said items was gone. I could no longer get updates of my friend’s shared items essentially rendering the feature useless. If you’re like me you’ve been plagued by the following screen since they introduced the feature:
Thanks to Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide we now have a solution and it’s easier than you think.
At this point you will have their new shared items displayed. From now on things will act normally and you can mark the items as read as you see fit.
These instructions are a complete interpretation of Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide’s original post.
I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I’m a fan of Google’s web applications. I make use of Google Notebook, Google Reader, Gmail and Google Docs daily. Every time I see they added some new features it makes me very happy. It also reminds me of just how useful Iterative Development practices are, especially in the Web world. It’s great to get a solid product out there and then update it routinely with enhancements.
Along with all the talk about Gmail 2.0 up and coming, along with their new push for Open Social, Orkut and now Android I’ve found a few other updates.
Web applications are the future. There is no comparison. The immediate feedback you get from releasing an update over the web is simply an undeniable advantage over client-side installed applications. Applications like Microsoft Office will become a thing of the past. Bandwidth will cease to become an issue and we’ll have all the same features but with immediate updates at our fingertips. As mentioned on JoelonSoftware a few weeks ago, spending money and time engineering todays software to utilize today’s hardware is a waste. Instead just realize that the hardware will handle it and performance will cease to be a problem
I happened across Kathleen Connally’s Photostream this morning and couldn’t find a feed for it through Google Reader or Firefox. Eventually I did find the RSS 2.0 button at the bottom, but before I found that I thought I’d create a quick (should take less than a minute) feed using Feed43. Unfortunately it appears Feed43 is down this morning. This is not good as I have several feeds created with the service that I read regularly. I’m hoping this is just a temporary hiccup and that they’ll be back but we’ll see.
If you’re looking for a replacement for Feed43 here are some options:
I’ll probably try them all in the next few days (especially if feed43 remains down) and offer my impressions of each.
BlogRush caught my eye today. Essentially it’s a way to increase traffic to your website. However, something else it does for you gave me a thought. For a while now I’ve been using my Google Reader Shared Items to let people know what I think is interesting and relevant. BlogRush has the unique ability to let my readers know what IS interesting and relevant. What’s even cooler is the more people that use my link the more interesting and relevant my content will be!
They finally did it! Google Reader added a search box!
A while back I posted about feed 43 and Feed Rinse. Since that time I’ve become even more of a feed junkie. I find not having to go searching for information a monumental time saver, and as such I’ve let my subscriptions grow to well over 200. Also I’d say I’ve become much more informed which may or may not turn out to be a good thing. My weapon of choice is still Google Reader and while talking with my friend Matt I discovered he has been using bloglines. We talked for a bit about the different features and I came to realize Google Reader is missing a few really nice things. Since our brief chat I’ve found several new feed tools to enhance my tool set. There are three features which Matt takes advantage of which I was unaware existed.
Let me first tackle #1. A few days ago I discovered Mail Bucket. This handy website will create a feed out of any email address you send it. They allow dots, dashes etc. All you need to do is have E-mails sent to blurb@mailbucket.org and the feed for that E-mail address instantly available at mailbucket.org/blurb.xml. Remember though, this is publicly available so make sure no sensitive E-mails are being sent there.
#2. Matt happened across Power Sellers Unite. This site allows you to create a feed from a UPS or USPS tracking number. This is something I had previously attempted to find but other sites had been blocked by UPS. Let’s hope this one doesn’t anytime soon.
#3. This one turned out to be much easier than I had thought. As it turns out you can make any folder in Google Reader public. Thanks to Google Reader’s tagging/folder system this turns out wonderfully as any feed can exist in more than one folder. Therefor you can keep them categorized as you wish, and simply add a feed to the ‘public’ folder (or in my case use the blogroll tag).
Another helpful site I happened across recently that can help you Up Your (feed) Arsenal is Yahoo Pipes. This fancy little site might one day replace both Feed 43 and Feed Rinse and numerous others but for now it’s just a site to keep an eye on.
Today’s Media sources are truly impressive. The pure amount of information available and the ways in which to get it are just astounding. After struggling for a long time I started with a blog. That helped, then I discovered Google Reader and that helped a little more. I then installed a wiki which only I have access to. That helped me manage my ideas and organize thoughts and helped a lot.
But today… today my good friend Tim let me in on a little secret. Google Reader’s shared items. I’ve always seen the feature sitting there and not really paid much attention to it. I noticed he had added his Google Reader’s shared items application to his facebook profile.
Suddenly, Like Robert Scoble, I am Media. I share lots of things I find all over the internet via lots of different tools. instant messages (or should i say Pidgin?) E-mail, In-person (gasp!), and our Blog. Recently I’ve been struggling with how to share these things efficiently. For a while I posted a lot of videos on our Blog. I don’t like this. The blog is supposed to be our thoughts and how people can keep up on what we’re doing. It had become a place to keep up on what we’re reading/watching. I didn’t want to use my site because that’s intended to be more of a professional atmosphere where I share projects, ideas and thoughts I have dealing strictly with the software industry (or wherever I end up).
Well now I’ve found my mechanism. If you are interested my shared items can be found here. There’s even a feed for those of you who like that idea. Also it’s now displayed on our website in a sidebar widget.
Yesterday Rachel and I went to go see the Puppies again. They’re getting Huge! I think we’ve picked out the one we want. Rachel and I both like “Mr Light Blue.” Maybe I’ll setup a poll to let people pick which puppy they think we should get. We still need to decide on a name. If you have suggestions let us know.
Matt showed a few coworkers and myself two cool things to fight off SPAM. A feature built into all E-mail servers and a new telephone service. Both of which if implemented properly will significantly reduce the amount of SPAM you’ll get.The following E-mail addresses are all equivalent:
Start only handing out E-mail addresses with +___ in them. This allows you to filter the incoming E-mails very easily, see where a lot of your spam is coming from (aka who’s selling it) and maybe take some actions in that regard.
Grand Central is a free telephone forwarding service that you can use as your own personal phone screener. One of my favorite features is the ability to send all incoming phone calls for anyone you don’t already know to voicemail. If you do want to take all phone calls, people you don’t know are prompted for their name and you are given several options before ever talking to them. The available options include recording the conversation, sending it to voicemail (and listening in) or simply taking the call. Check it out it’s really slick.
According to PC World the 50 Most Important People on the Web.
If you like to browse Blog’s In the WordPress development Blog‘s most recent post they listed the speakers of the SxSW this weekend. I started browsing a few of them. Some are very interesting, I’ll post my favorites later.
I’ve said for a while that the next car I buy is either going to have built in GPS or i’m going to build a computer (with GPS) to put in the car. It looks like BMW is getting it right. Check out their latest onboard computer, its pretty sweet:
I’ve always kept track of a lot of websites and with RSS it certainly makes it nicer. However I never found an RSS Reader that I really liked. Recently a friend alerted me to Google’s Reader. I’ve started importing RSS feeds that I like to keep an eye on and it’s pretty nice. However I found that it means there’s just another site I have to go to to see if anything new has happened. I did some googling and found a Google Reader Notifier Extension for Firefox. Seem’s to be exactly what I wanted.
I added a Wedding page to the site. At the moment it just contains a count down timer. We’ll add more relevent info later like time/date/place/photographer/dj/honeymoon/hotel suggestions/etc.
Rachel and I will be in Buffalo for St Patricks day. We’re going to see Piebald. They’re kicking off a new tour starting in Buffalo and Rachel’s friend Allison knows them. We’re tagging along and we might even get to meet the band. Pretty sweet. If you want to listen to some of their stuff take a look click here.
Randy Aldrich 