Archive for the 'RSS' Category

HOWTO: Google Reader Power User Guide

April 21, 2008

If you’re the kind who keeps track of information on the web by subscribing to RSS feeds, chances are things aren’t entirely satisfactory.

You’re probably swamped with an ever-growing backlog, yet reading your feeds takes too long. You’re annoyed at several feeds repeating the same news item. And your feed list looks like one chaotic mess.

Surely this wasn’t the way it promised to be – you thought you could wade through information effortlessly with RSS.

A few simple techniques and just a little but of discipline, though, can get you back in business. I’m assuming you’re using Google Reader.

Adding feeds:

  • Subscribe, as far as possible, to blogs that do filtering for you. For example, instead of subscribing to several of the “official” Google blogs, I merely subscribe to “Googling Google”, “Google Blogoscoped”, and “Google Operating System” – they’ll give me all the news I need to know about Google, and other rumors/previews as well.
  • Add feeds liberally, but label them smartly. If you see an interesting website add it to your feed list, but label it immediately.
  • Label according to use/function, not topic. Labeling your feeds “politics”, “tech”, “humor” is no use. Something like this makes more sense:
    • A “News” label for your online newspaper/Google News feeds.
    • A “Daily” label for other, topical feeds you read once a day.
    • A “Evenings” label for humor blogs, cartoons, and the like.
    • A “DB” label for websites that spew information you’ll only need to refer to once in a while (techies, I’m talking Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and the like). Use Google Reader’s search function when digging out info later. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for this one.)

Processing feeds:

  • Read different labels at different times of the day. From the above example, you’d read “News” as soon as you come in to work, “Evenings” to unwind, and so on.
  • Use the “List” view. You can see more headlines that way, so if you don’t want to read it, there’s no need to scroll through it to reach the next item. Also, you don’t have to wait for images to load.
  • Use “Mark all as read” liberally. After scanning 20 news headlines and reading 4, for instance, make all 20 read. The other 16 never mattered anyway.
  • Use keyboard shortcuts. At a minimum, “n” and “p” are “next item” and “previous item”, and “u” hides/shows the feed list pane on the left.
  • View entire labels instead of clicking and viewing individual blogs. For instance, simply click on “News” and sift through all your headlines – what do you care what order they’re in or what feed they came from? They’re all news.
  • Star actionable posts. Once you’re done reading, see all your starred posts and take action for each of them.
  • Go offline! The offline feature (at the top right of your GR page) downloads your latest 200 feed items. Then disconnect your computer from the network, and read through your feeds without distraction.

Maintaining feeds:

  • Friends’ shared items can be useful/amusing. Or they can be a pain. Hide friends whose shared items you don’t want to view.
  • Use the trends view in Google Reader to see which feeds you don’t read any more, or ones which haven’t been updated in ages. Unsubscribe from them.

Work smarter, not harder.

Moving to an Online Life

April 14, 2008


So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

Gmail - Custom

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Google Notebook

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on WordPress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the WordPress plugins I use:

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

What I want most from my RSS reader…

February 1, 2008

… is the ability to add (and view) comments for a post.

Right now, I still need to navigate to the website (out of my RSS reader) and comment in the little form at the bottom of the page. That is *so* old-world Web!

Of course, several blogging platforms (WordPress for one) offer RSS feeds for comments, but having separate feeds is non-optimal for two reasons. One, comments are only useful in the context of the parent post. Viewing it as an independent feed doesn’t fit in with that. Two, it still doesn’t solve the problem of adding comments.

An RSS reader is still a one-way street, funneling content from several websites into one location. Ideally, all of a user’s interactions with a website (read/write/view) could be done via RSS feeds. Because, after all, that was the intent of publishing a feed in the first place – to save the user the tedium of having to actually *visit* the website.

Imagine. Posts. Comments. Advertising. Live chat. All through the RSS reader.

Reader: Google's new social network

December 16, 2007

Steve Rubel talks about the significance about the new “Friends’ Shared Items ” feature on Google Reader. I was about to write about this, but Steve’s put it better than I’d planned.

The popular RSS reader now lets you easily see what your friends are sharing from their river of news and allows you to do the same. This turns Google Reader into a social network, complete with profiles… (Google) is tapping into the Gmail address book and using it to transform all of its static services into on-the-fly communities.

Well it’s true. I find myself logging in to Reader more often because I’m interested in reading what my friends have found interesting (in addition to what they’re blogging about). But most importantly,

Social networking isn’t just about a few standalone sites but a bunch of different address books that actually make the entire web more social.

Which is exactly what makes Facebook such an attractive acquisition. Not just for the opportunity to server ads on its pages (Microsoft’s planted its flag firmly there), but to drive traffic to _other_ properties for serving more advertising.