Fixie Friday - Red Hot Nagasawa 1977
This gorgeous fixie gets this week vote for it being as old as I am. Glad to see that even older bikes can still be pleasing to look at. Unlike me!
via FGGT
Faster, Easier Writing
I've been following the tips from this post in the last week and I'm already starting to see the benefits.
Confession: I've never used IRC
It's one of the first big technologies to emerge from the early days of the Internet, it's still a preferred form of chatting online for many people and yet I've never used it. I'm taking about Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short. I wouldn't expect many people to have used it with the abundance of free chat apps that are now available for mobile devices, but what I think is unusual about me is that I've been using the Internet for over 20 years, well before the age of mobile devices and apps and to this day I've never used IRC.
The first time I heard about IRC was during a tutorial class at univeristy. We were supposed to be learning about using multimedia to put together an interactive article but with the teaching assistant only able to focus on one quarter of the room at a time, many students were in fact using the time to chat with friends on IRC. When one of my class mates showed me what it was I was intrigued but it quickly slipped my mind and for a few years I never looked at it again.
In the early years of my career I then discovered that many of the programming languages and topics I was interested in at the time had matching channels where like minded developers could meet to help each other out. Even then though I didn't see the point in using it. What might have been a major road block for me was that I wasn't an active computer user outside of work. Work was work and it started at 9am and finished at 5pm. Since then I'm glad to say that my attitude to my career has changed and I've taken it a bit more seriously and invested in reading and learning programming languages in my spare time. Still to this day though I've not used IRC.
A few years ago when the Ruby on Rails framework was in its early years, there might have been an active channel or two for developers to chat about the framework and help each other out but social networks are gradually replacing old technologies like IRC. It won't be long before just the die hards are left using IRC. I've no doubt that it is a good way of communicating online, I just think that people that know about IRC look for something a bit more shiny in terms of a user interface while many new users to the Internet immediately turn to social networks rathen than the protocols that existed in the early days of the Internet.
Even though I've never used IRC, I think it's a shame that a key technology such as IRC is overlooked and frequently never considered as an option when looking for places to chat with like minded people. IRC numbers might be dwindling but I am going to download an IRC client and open up a few channels to see what all the fuss is about. With just one dedicated social network under my belt, I think I can afford sometime exploring other ways of chatting online. Besides, I might actually get to like it. I know I usually hold off when it comes to adopting new technologies and apps but I think 20 years is too long a time to wait to see if something takes off. IRC is still here so why not give it a try?
Chad Fowler's book, The Passionate Programmer has a chapter entitled 'Mind Reader'. In it Chad talks about a colleague who was always turning in work ahead of it being asked for.
That's where Rao's magic trick came in. He didn't talk much in those conversations, but he was anything but disengaged. He was listening carefully. And, giving away his secret as no magician would, he later told me the trick was that he was only doing the things that I had already said I wanted. I had just said them in ways that were subtle enough that even I didn't realize I had said them.
I think we both agree on the fact this is no trick. It's better than that. It's someone listening intently, capturing ideas and suggestions no matter how small they are.
Based on experience this is a task in itself. I've been in many a meeting where suggestions have been banded about, but never followed up. Then months later when the team did get some time to implement these ideas, they were almost forgotten and so needed another meeting just to remind everyone about them. Despite this happening several times, there was little motivation from the team to record each of these ideas, let alone try these ideas out on their own.
The other day I refactored a bit of code that was duplicated across the code base a number of times. It was one of those little jobs that had been mentioned in the past by the client but never written down on the board as something we would like to have. As I was already working on changes in a nearby section of the code, I decided to refactor out the duplication. It took me just over a half hour to do. Happy that it was working correctly, I pushed my changes up for testing and moved onto the next card. The client might not spot it right away, but it's there. A small improvement to the code that just took me an extra half hour to do. A duplication removed that means that any changes to those parts of the code can now be done in one place rather than four.
My problem isn't that I don't listen, it's that I don't capture enough during those meetings and what I don't capture I end up forgetting. I don't record the small things in favour of the big picture and while many might see that as a good thing, the small things give us small wins that contribute to the bigger picture.
From now on I'm going to make a point of capturing more details during my meetings with the clients and keep a list of minor changes that have been recognized but not formally requested. As long as these changes are small, tested and don't impact the code base in a negative way then I say it's fair game to be implemented.
Getting the Most from Feedbin
There's been a lot of talk over the last couple of years that RSS is dead and it certainly didn't look good when Google closed their RSS reading service, Google Reader. Since the news that it was closing though there has been a number of new RSS services that aim to fill the gap. Having tried a couple I evetually choose Feedbin. It looked promising from the start and I'm glad to see that today it has grown into an amazing application and makes managing and reading your RSS feeds easy.
Over the course of the last year or two, Feedbin has added a number of great features to the service. I thought I would round up some of my favourite features that I use daily to manage my RSS feeds.
Time To Unsubscribe?
One of the problems I had with Google Reader was that it was difficult to see when a feed was last updated and how active it was. Overtime people lose interest in keeping their site updated so eventually feeds start to stagnate. It was hard to see this in Google Reader. Unless you were aware of the decline in posts, which is easy if you only follow so many accounts, there wasn't a way to check your feeds to see which were active and in-active.
Feedbin solves this problem on the feeds page of your account. Not only can you search and unsubscribe from feeds, you can also sort them according to when they were last updated and also how active the feed is. This makes it easy to spot the sites that are slowing down in posting and might be worth unsubscribing from.
Take A Shortcut
Google Reader had a great set of keyboard shortcuts. I even created a mind map for the shortcuts to help me memorise them. They were essential in allowing me to quickly scan through all my feeds and mark those that were worth reading later on in the day. You'll be glad to hear then that Feedbin also has a great collection of keyboard shortcuts at your disposal. With these you can navigate around your feeds, search, action articles and even share them to your own connected services such as App.net and Twitter.
If you're not a software developer then you might be more familiar with using the mouse when it comes to navigating your applications. For applications such as Feedbin, I say give the keyboard a try. While you might hit a few stumbling blocks at the start, trying to remember what key does what, keep at it. Using the keyboard is a much faster way of interacting with the computer and the keyboard shortcuts for Feedbin are minimal. There are only 20 sets of shortcuts to remember with most of them being a single key, but even learning just a quarter of these will make such a difference. And the best part, just press '?' on your keyboard while using Feedbin and it will display all the shortcuts you need.
Action!
One of my early gripes with Google Reader was the lack of automation. Some feeds I subscribed too always needed a specific action or used for logging purposes. For these feeds I wanted them starred or marked as read as soon as they came in. In Google Reader this wasn't possible, but it can be in Feedbin.
Feedbin has a section in the setting page called Actions. Here you can define actions that meet one or multiple feeds. The two actions available are starring an article or marking an article as read. There might be more in the future but for now these make automating the management of your feeds a lot easier. Why would you do this though?
Some feeds are always interesting. I subscribe to the Caesura Letters newsletter through an RSS feed. I star the article every day so that I can find it at lunchtime for further reading. It's one less action to do on a daily basis but it still saves a bit of time.
Save Time, Save That Search
Searching your RSS feeds is a routine thing for me. Maybe I'm looking for a specific set of articles or articles that feature a specific keyword. What happens though when you want to do that search over and over again? Well you save it!
Feedbin has a great feature called saved searches that lets you save the searches you carry out over your feeds. These appear in your sidebar with the search icon beside them so that you can differentiate them from the rest of your feeds. One saved search I have is my 'Recently Mentioned' search.
I follow a number of blogs that are part of an relaxed circle of bloggers. We link to each other's posts for other people to see. It's not a traffic building thing, we just link the stuff we find interesting from each other on our blogs. I was getting mentioned a few times when I thought about having a search for this. With my saved search now, I can see when I was last mentioned. You might call it an ego thing, but I prefer to think of it as a validation tool to see what people find interesting. It helps to find out what people link to on my blog and whether I should publish similar content.
Use Your Favourite Reading App
Feedbin also has an API that allows other apps to connect to Feedbin. While Feedbin excels as a great application on the big screen of a desktop, laptop and tablet, I find the mobile interface not that easy to use for scanning feeds. My app of choice for checking my feeds on my iPhone is the wonderful Unread by Jared Sinclair. With simple gestures for quickly scanning and actioning articles, it is by far the best app I have found yet that connects to my Feedbin account.
Feedbin is a great RSS reader and I use it daily, often multiple times a day. The best part of Feedbin though is the automation. The actions and sharing to your favourite services are the best time savers for me. With feeds handled automatically in the background and one key press to share to other services like Instapaper, I can breeze through hundreds of articles on a daily basis.
Great Guide to That First Draft
Michael Wade has the best advice for getting that first draft done.
Fixie Friday - Colnago Master Pista
via FGGT
Twitter and Facebook are huge in terms of the number of users they have, but is this always a good thing?
Not a week goes by where I'm reminded of the popularity of social networks. Whenever there's a global event happening, you can be sure that there will be lots of updates about it. Not only that but when you turn on the television now every company and brand has a related Facebook page or a Twitter account. Twitter and Facebook are everywhere. It seems that everyone is on one or the other. Well okay, not quite everyone but it's safe to say that most are.
Last night was the opening night of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Aside from the first part of the opening ceremony with the giant dancing Tunnocks teacakes, it went fairly well. Like most big events I wondered if anyone was talking about it on App.net. I fired open my App.net client to check. No one had mentioned it. Not one post. Up until the first hour I don't think there was a single post about it. I breathed a sigh relief.
Why the relief? Well there was no negative comments, bitching or snide remarks. You didn't have to cut through the negativity. In this case you didn't have to cut through anything at all. It was refreshing to not have to filter through people's views, posts, pictures and other stuff.
And that's what I love about App.net. It's a small community of people. Okay it might not have the millions of users that other social networks has but if the people in your timeline are not sharing in the same event as yourself then it's okay. They might just be doing something else that matters to them. It's a nice reminder that despite what happening around your part of the world, there's other things happening around the rest of the world too.
If App.net continues to gain users at a slower rate than other networks then that's okay. As long as it remains profitable and continues to serve it's users I'll keep on calling it my little part of the social internet.
Productivity is About Processes
Dazzled by the lights of new task management app? Before switching, make sure you're switching for the right reasons. Productivity isn't about the apps.
Read any productivity book and you'll find a common observation among them. Rarely is a specific tool mentioned that makes that specific productivity method work better.
I spent a good couple of years hopping from app to app in search of a task management app that met my requirements. It wasn't a wasted journey, I did get to try out a number of different apps but I didn't have a productivity method in mind that I would use with the app. I was simply trying some apps out. I was going about this the wrong way, you see it should be the other way around. Productivity is about processes not tools. The tools we use should compliment our preferred productivity method.
Look at any productivity method and it's about the processes and workflows involved. Capturing, reviewing, planning and executing are the most common processes involved in most methods. I use all four of these processes in my own method which centers around a single list of actions. I then use projects and tags to group actions, filters to review and a calendar for scheduling those actions.
The processes I use means that I could use just about any task management app, but it's in the details where you can find great task management apps. Here's a list of requirements that I finally settled on.
- I need to be able to capture anywhere.
- I need to group related actions into projects.
- I need to group actions by tags.
- I need to see different views of my list.
- I need my list available to me wherever I go.
Looking at these requirements I can think of a number of task management apps that could meet all these requirements. After reviewing a number of apps that I've tried in the past I found a couple that worked for me. I choose TaskPaper as it gave me the ability to keep my master list in one location in raw text. After a few months though my list became difficult to manage. I started looking for a replacement.
One task management application that I hadn't tried up to this point was Todoist. I started moving my master list over to Todoist. That was eight months ago. Today I'm still using Todoist. It meets all my requirements and also provides a number of other features that I didn't look for before in a task management app.
With a crowded marketplace of task management apps it can be easy to be dazzled by the new kid on the block, but productivity isn't about those apps. It's about the processes. If you're on the market for a new task management app or you're simply looking for a change, make sure you are looking for an app that fits your processes.
