My now page is live. Is yours?

Thanks to Derek Sivers for the idea.

I've added this one to my DailyMuse collection.

There is much that you want to do and much that can be done but fortunately there is much less that really needs to be done.

Don't let the first two categories distract from the third.

— The Stuff on Your List by Michael Wade

Tonight marks the start of one of my Christmas traditions. The annual reading of A Christmas Carol.

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

— A Christmas Carol

I received my first copy of the book 30 years ago. I've missed a few readings of it over the years but I haven't missed a reading of it in the last 15 years. The story, the language, the characters, everything about it is fantastic.

This is it. The last one of the year folks and what better way to finish this year's Fixie Friday series than with this beautiful Cannondale Track.

via PEDAL Consumption

Great to see that DuckDuckGo is still growing.

Through Dec. 15, DuckDuckGo received 3.25 billion search queries this year, according to its publicly posted traffic statistics. That’s up 74% over the same period last year. Monday, Dec. 14 was its first day with more than 12 million direct queries.

— DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track its users, grew more than 70% this year by Quartz

Although still not in the same league as Google, I think it's only a matter of time before they start to encroach on Google's dominance of the search industry.

Follow the seven steps from Nicholas Bate.

There's no shortcuts or life hacks to this. Just honest work, but it's the best way.

I'll be honest. I'm probably not the ideal person to be giving advice on writing but here's a little bit of advice for those aspiring bloggers and writers who frequently question their own writing much like I do.

Last week I had an idea for a technical article. Over the course of the next few days I outlined the article, wrote a couple of drafts, edited it and then read the final draft back to myself. I hated it. It lacked purpose and it didn't offer enough value to the programmers who would be reading it. In the past I would have simply trashed the article and moved onto something else but is there another way?

In her book "Manage Your Project Portfolio", Johanna Rothman has great advice about evaluating software projects and deciding what action to take with projects.

Once you’ve decided you should do this project, you have a limited number of decisions to make. You can commit to a project, kill a project, or transform a project to increase its chances of success.

This could be equally applied to writing.

I've already mentioned that in the past I would trash any articles that didn't meet the grade. Everything else was published. What about transforming that article into something else though? Could we salvage something from it?

I decided to transform the article rather than killing it. It took a couple of hours but in the end up I had a different style of article on a related topic to my original article. I was happy enough with the final result and its now added to the growing pile of technical articles to be published next year.

When it comes to writing it doesn't need to be publish or trash. If something doesn't meet the grade then consider transforming it into something else. It's definitely worth considering rather than throwing away what could be a potentially great piece of writing.

Honoured to be once again included in Kurt Harden's 25 Blogs Guaranteed to Make You Smarter and to be amongst other great bloggers.

And yes Kurt, maybe a meet up is on the cards in the near future.

My plan for celebrating the day (which, truthfully, I started last night) is to open up past year’s journals, logs, and notes and tease out any ideas that may have gotten lost in the shuffle and see what I might want to put into action the coming year. On August 10, 2014 I noted that my wife and I were a pretty good canoe team after a jaunt out on the lake at our family cabin and that, perhaps, we should go canoeing more often here in town.

— Today is Journal Day by The Cramped

I'm just getting mine ready for the new year.

Dropbox has decided to call it a day on their photo management app Carousel and the email client Mailbox.

Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.

— Saying goodbye to Carousel and Mailbox by Dropbox

To be honest this isn't going to have any impact on me. I didn't use either of these services, but what's interesting is that we're losing another good email client to a tech giant. I didn't use Mailbox myself but it's clear from the many messages and comments that lots of people used and they rated it very highly.

I remember using Sparrow for a few months as my email client before they were acquired by Google. I loved using it but upon the news that it was being acquired I quickly switched back to using my previous email client.

It's unfortunate that great software applications are acquired and then disbanded or boxed away inside the tech giants. I can't comment on the companies and individuals that are acquired in this way though. I would find it hard to say no to any sizeable amount of money for a software product that I owned.

Makes you wonder why on Earth the US military has needed billions for more advanced bombers when this still works.

The B-52 is an Air Force plane that refuses to die. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, it continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement. And its replacement’s replacement’s replacement.

— After 60 Years, B-52s Still Dominate U.S. Fleet by The New York Times

A while a go I wrote about my move to Feedbin from Feedly and my reasons for the move. At the time I was still getting used to something other than Google's great RSS reader. Feedly in itself was fine but it didn't have the staying power I wanted. I had to login back in on different devices and there wasn't much in the way of new features. So I moved to Feedbin and over two years later I'm still using it. Here's why.

Features, Features, Features

Feedbin is under continual development and every few of months there's a new feature released or small improvements made to the user-interface. It might seem like a lot of time in between releases, but from the start Feedbin already did everything that was essential. You could subscribe to RSS feeds and read them when you wanted too. Everything that has followed has been "nice to haves" and each one of them makes the experience of using Feedbin even better.

A Great Web Interface

From the start the Feedbin web interface was good. Overtime it's been gradually tweaked and made better. Add to the mix a customisable interface with settings for fonts, text size and themes and you have a web interface that negates the need for any desktop RSS reader. Just use it in your browser.

Also the keyboard shortcuts allow you to move about your feeds without having to reach for the mouse. Even sharing articles to your favourite services like Instapaper and Pinboard is easy because you assign keyboard shortcuts to each of your share locations.

The Notifier App

Finally there's the notifier app. Now maybe I'm alone in this but RSS feeds are a great way of monitoring and tracking services. Funneling these notifications into a single device means that you can stay on top of essential services for clients. As a freelance web developer I have clients that need to know when their websites are likely to face downtime.

To do this I keep a track of the different service they use by subscribing to their status page's RSS feed. In the Feedbin notifier app I can then get notifications of these updates as and when they happen. If a client is likely to see downtime on their website I can give them a heads up on it and we can arrange suitable changes for them if needed.

Feedbin is still one of my essential tools as a web developer, both for consuming content and for keeping up to date with any urgent news. I highly recommend Feedbin if you're in the market for a versatile RSS reader.

“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see."

— New Horizons Returns First of the Best Images of Pluto by NASA