Google Reader finally has a search box, but more importantly, actually tells you how many items are left to read if there are more than 100.
Previously, you’d just get the extremely descriptive 100+ which didn’t really give you a realistic estimate of how much reading there was to do.
It is about time!
I am officially back from the Lake District. Well, actually, I was back on Saturday, but as always I’ve jumped straight back into all sorts of stuff and haven’t got round to updating this blog yet. Had a good time up there – did lots of walking, seeing things and just generally spending time with the family and getting away from things. Wasn’t completely unplugged, got some (expensive) wifi while I was there for a couple of hours over the week.
Actually I had re-enabled my Zooomr photos in the sidebar of my site (on all pages except blog pages). It now works as the feeds from Zooomr which got lost during the transition to the new Mark III version of the site have reappeared.
Unfortunately, I’ve decided to take them off again. Even with Magpie caching (I have a neato Magpie RSS-based parsing solution for the feed to make the photos appear on the sidebar), it slowed down the site loading times to an absolute crawl, so I’ve disabled it.
If I get time, I might redo it and do the Magpie execution via cron, store the results in a static file and just read that at runtime. But that is a big if. For now, no photos!
FOSSwire is doing amazingly well. We’re on track to hitting a very significant visitor number milestone (not telling you exactly what just yet!) by the end of this month, so right now we’re doing a massive push to get as much content in the next few days as possible.
College starts again soon – which means even less time for all this stuff, unfortunately. I have to go in on Thursday and do the whole re-enrol and all the admin tasks associated with that and then on Monday it’s back to the daily grind. 😛
In the meantime, I’ll try and keep this blog a little more frequently updated – but no promises!
If you’re like me and open Terminal.app quickly under Mac OS X to do something, but then want to open your working directory in the Finder (perhaps to drag something to another location or just see the current directory graphically), I found a really neat trick.
The simple command:
open .
Will open the current directory in the Finder. Very useful for me anyway.
How immature of me. 🙂
Go Digg (if you want to of course).
Huge props to fellow FOSSwire blogger Jacob. His Linux/Unix command line cheat sheet hit the front page of Digg (with 1335 votes right now).
It did bring down MySQL on the FOSSwire server for a time, but we’re now back online and serving the site.
Over 25,000 hits so far and counting!
Jacob, you rock.
As I write this I’m approaching the final stages (I hope) of a Google Reader feed reading marathon. Due to time constraints, I literally haven’t had a chance over the past few days to open it up and catch up with the world.
Now that I am doing so, it becomes a marathon of reading stuff.
Which brings me to an idea – why can’t there be some way to prioritise my feeds? Rank them perhaps, so that when I have limited time I can catch up with the feeds I’m most interested in reading and get the rest later.
This is sort of what products like Particls do I suppose, and said product apparently has some neat algorithms for working out what you find most interesting. While they only have a Windows version and my only Windows installation isn’t hooked up to the internet (I can’t be bothered to maintain it anymore and wouldn’t use it anyway for the annoyance of rebooting to get to everything else), I probably won’t use Particls though.
Additionally, I don’t know whether I’d get annoyed by using both Particls and Google Reader and end up reading duplicate stuff. I’m not a user – so I don’t know whether that would be an issue.
Which is a shame – because I think I’d really like it.
So here’s my idea – get some kind of ranking system built in to Google Reader so I can go for a quick 10-minute catch up hit on the most important stuff and come back to the rest later when I have time.
Either that or get me Particls for OS X or Linux (preferably both and with the data synced 😉 ).
Or maybe just cut down on the amount of content I’m consuming.
UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!
Just installed Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible Tools on this blog and I’m quickly posting to see if it’s going to update with the fact I’ve made a blog post.
UPDATE: it worked – woot.
This news is pretty cool – all of FeedBurner’s Pro features are being rolled out across all accounts for free. Clearly, Google don’t need the money and have a different business model in mind – people’s data.
Still, I’ve enabled ProStats and am looking forward to using the MyBrand feature (so I can pop my feeds onto feeds.upfold.org.uk in due course). You have to email them to enable that, so I’m still waiting for a response.
Pretty cool features to have for free though. Don’t worry, we’re working on them for FOSSwire too! Well, I’m not, but other people are. 🙂
I have 5 Skitch invites. If anyone wants one, drop a comment. 🙂
Don’t put your email address in the body of your comment, just put it in the email address field then I can see it but not the spambots.
UPDATE: all gone!
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