Patrick’s Musings

According to Google Reader I’m the only person subscribed to the ALP RSS Feed.

Feed URL: http://www.labor.com.au/media/rss/2.0/feed.xml
Posts per week:26.4Subscribers:1Last updated:7:42 AM (1 hour ago)

I can hardly talk, only 2 Google Reader users are subscribed to my blog, 1 is me, I’m assuming the other is my wife. (Hello dearest).

Looking at many of my other feeds which I’m the only subscriber many are friends, coworkers or other acquaintances.

For a long time I thought Firefox with 20 extensions and 50 greasemonkey scripts was more perfect browser, then Google released Chrome and I instantly fell in love with its speed and features. Sure the beta versions sometimes hang, but overall it was a real pleasure to use. Except for one problem, a website I use daily, often for hours, which Google Chrome can’t manage as well as Firefox can. The site you ask? Google Reader. I receive 200-500 articles a day in Google Reader, and in Firefox I can fly through them using keyboard shortcuts, j/k for down/up, S for sharing, e for email etc. And the most wonderful shortcut of all v to view the article on it’s original website. What’s that you say, all those work in Google Chrome, well yes, they sure do, but Firefox has a setting in about:config that is called browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground. This means any link that would normally open in a new tab or window, instead opens in a background tab. So I can fly through the headlines, open the articles I want to read in the background and read them at my leisure later.

Not so in Google Chrome. The links open in the foreground, interupting my browsing and forcing me to ctrl-tab to the next window. This is inefficient and makes browsing annoying. Back to firefox for me until Google gets this one sorted out. I’m not the only disgruntled Google Chrome user switching back. Sure I’ll miss some features. But I’m sure someone will create a Firefox extension to implement them soon. Stephen Shankland over at Cnet lists a couple of the features that Firefox needs to match Chrome.

I’ve just found another feature that Google Chrome doesn’t have that drives me bonkers, in WordPress when I highlight a word and press the link shortcut a popup alert box asks me for the URL I want to insert, in Firefox the text field is already active and I can press ctrl-v and enter to create the link, Chrome doesn’t even activate the window, so I have to click my mouse on the window first to be able to enter the URL. Gah!

I’ve often quested for the best way for me to keep track of my ToDo list. To date this has involved a paper diary, a notepad, a PDA, gmail, gcal, outlook and not enough time. Most of my list items do not have Due by dates, they just have to be done. Often the things I want to do I think of while I am away from my computer, pda, notepad or have lost my pen. But what do I always have on me? My mobile phone of course. Can you imagine leaving the home without it? I could just save notes on it, I do have a java notepad installed, but it isn’t conducive to me being reminded of the list. Finally I have found myself a nice solution that is more or less automatic.

1. Sign up for Jaiku or Twitter or a similar service. I use Jaiku because Twitter never received my SMS confirmation. (Apparently a known issue for Australians).
2. Add Jaiku/Twitter to your address book on your phone. I called the entry ” Jaiku” the leading space ensures it is the very first entry in my phonebook.
3. Configure your Jaiku account to be private if you don’t want this information to be published.
4. Get the (private) RSS feed for your Jaiku account. If you do want it to be private to get the private feed url, click on the “overview” tab and use the RSS feed from that page, not the “Your Jaiku’s” tab.
5. Forward that feed to your email. I found the easiest way for me was to use RSS2Email as I have my own Unix server with a 24/7 network connection. If you don’t you could use RSSFwd or a similar service, though I found them to be not as responsive. If you are using Gmail, forward them to a custom address ie username+rssnotes@gmail.com.
6. There is no step 6.
7. username+rssnotes@gmail.com (or all emails from jaiku or something similar) as **To Do** use the asterisks to put the To Do label at the top of your labels list. ( I also have it set to skip the inbox and forward a copy to my work email address to get the reminder into outlook as well).
8. When inspiration strikes and you are alone in the world with no convenient pen, wifi, pda or similar, SMS your stroke of genius to Jaiku (or Twitter) and voila a few minutes later depending on your rss 2 email setup the message is in gmail and looking prominent at the top of your label box.
9. Once I have completed a task I mark the email as read. Because a Jaiku or Twitter message is quite small by default normally the subject of the email will be the whole reminder. “Buy milk”, “Pickup Son from daycare” etc.

Note: Once this is setup, you only have to do steps 8 and 9 on a regular basis you’ll never have to setup the rest again.

I was glancing through one of the thousands of rss feeds I get every day at Google Reader when this postby Mitch Joel caught my attention. I have a passing interest in the democamp idea, but it was the footnote of his blog that I was most caught by, Mitch asks:

How are we going to manage all of this content and conversation? Clearly it won’t just be Google Reader (I’m currently staring at 7002 unread Blog postings) or iTunes (I have over thirty Podcasts that have not been listened to). Is it a question about the amount of content and not how we manage it?

I myself have often asked this, asides from the 4-6 podcasts a week I listen to for university, there are dozens that I’d like to listen to, if only I had the time. RSS feeds are the same, I subscribe to 20-30 blogs, a dozen news outlets, the press release feeds of most Australian political parties & several action groups. To top this off, and what brought me to Mitch’s blog, I subscribe to another dozen feeds of Google Blog Search. For those who don’t know, Google Blog Search feeds dutifully search blogs for your selected keywords, and then provide you with the RSS feed. Neat isn’t it!

I tend to spend about an hour a day looking at Google Reader, that isn’t even a tenth of the time it would take for me to read all the posts, I search the page as best as I can considering Google Blog Search has NO search function. I browse through the page as fast as my mousewheel can take me, and pick out keywords. (That’s how I found Mitch’s blog). I also sort my personal “must read” blogs, like Oz Politics Blog into their own category so I will read every entry in those blogs, this is a much more manageable 150 odd posts a day.

I throw down the gauntlet to people who can program better than I, build me a better mousetrap, erm, feed reader. Google reader would be great, if it had a search function, could learn what I like based on stars and highlight things that might be of interest to me & keep track of feeds better. I often see the same entry from Digg multiple times because it was exported under multiple categories.

*edit* It appears I’m not the only person who gets multiple posts of the same feed, Michael Gray recently ranted about it too.