Matthew Lang

Remember having a start page? I do.

Everytime I would open my browser, I would be faced with a billboard of widgets that funnelled in data from different sources and displayed them all on the one screen. It was beautiful. Before RSS readers took off, the start page was the go to place for all your news.

I remember my first start page, the Google Personalised Homepage. It was great. All my important feeds on the one screen. Everything I wanted to read for the day in one place. Gradually this evolved over time into iGoogle and with it came changeable backgrounds, widgets created by Google and thousands of widgets created by others. It went to a tabbed page so that you could setup multiple tabs on your homepage. Now you could categorise widgets and cram more data into your home page and you wouldn't need to scroll down to view those widgets, you just clicked on a different part of the screen (yes, I'm failing to see the convenience in this too).

Along came time based backgrounds. These were backgrounds that would change over the course of the day. Now you didn't need to see the same thing in your background all through the day, it would change as the day went on. You could only see this if the you didn't have a screen crammed full of widgets.

I even tried Netvibes for a brief spell and while it as fun to try something different, I went back to using iGoogle after not using it for a week. It was just too familiar and easy to use. Also I had invested time in getting the start page setup exactly as I wanted it.

All good things come to an end though and sadly last year, Google pulled the plug on iGoogle. Online trends have moved on from start pages. Most people now open social media clients as their first port of call for the day or maybe they go straight to their favourite news site to catch up. Only the insane try and start the day by opening their inbox.

Only a few services remain now that offer the start page experience, but I don't see the benefit in using them now. There's too much data out there for me to consume, certainly too much to fit on iGoogle regardless of how many tabs you have on the page.

Feedbin is my new start page now with a greater focus on curated content rather than just letting any old thing in. It has multiple feeds in it like my start page had, but it's better at letting me choose what I want to read and that's more important now.

We IT folk love having backups of data, but what about backups of ourselves?

Carl Holscher describes more.

Yesterday I got a hold of my credit card statement. This is the statement for the credit card that I use for my freelance business. Web services, hosting, e-books and subscriptions all go on it. It's not wildy extravagant. Last month I spent just under £100 on products and services for my freelance business. I can definitely cut back on a couple of services I subscribe to and choose lower pricing plans, but there's another area where I can make savings.

Each month I pay a small amount to subscribe to a number of different services. For most of these services I'm happy to pay the monthly amount. It's always under £10 with the exception of one. Not a lot of money, but over the course of the year those add up.

Where I'm not saving money is paying the monthly subscription amount for these services rather than the annual amount. Most online products and services offer an annual discount that means you pay less for that service over the year. You do however have to pay for the annual service up front.

As I'm trying to keep a reign on my spending, I would love to switch to paying a once annual amount for these services, but with there being a handful that I can do this with, I'd rather not do it all in the one month. It would just cost too much money in the one month.

The alternative then is to stagger annual service subscriptions. Starting in April, I'm going to switch one service a month over to an annual subscription in order to save a bit more money. I'm already using these services on a monthly basis and have done for the last two years. I'm a regular payer and will continue to do so, so why not subscribe for a year and save myself some more money?

Making annual payments for products and services will increase my monthly spending for my business at first, but over the rest of the year, I'll see my monthly spending do down. There's a couple of trade-offs with this plan.

The first is that I'll be tied into that service for a longer period of time, but it's a trade-off I can live with. I've used the services I'm committing to for a few years now and I don't see me wanting to change in the next year at least.

The second is that my monthly spending projection will be hard to track given that some months will have larger one off payments. It's not a major inconvenience but I have been so used to maintaining a monthly amount that has been consistent for the last year.

Switching to annual plans for services is a difficult choice. I suggest that you only consider those services that are critical to your business and also offer a discount over paying monthly. You might only save yourself a small amount on one service, but across a handful of services you could be saving yourself a lot more. Definitely something worth thinking about.

via FGGT

Social networks are everywhere. Some are aimed at specific individuals and markets while others just want to be the biggest network on the planet. Visit any website for an individual and you're more than likely to see a string of icons where that person can be found on different social networks. You can see one at the top of this page right now. Take a peek. I'll wait.

Did you see it? A conservative list compared to many other network lists on the web. The reason my list is small is that these are the main networks I use on a daily basis. App.net for conversation, Github for coding, LinkedIn for my career and lastly the most over-looked social network of them all, the RSS feed to my blog. Where's the rest you might ask? Well they're not there for good reason. I simply don't use anything else. At all.

I'm happy with the networks I use and take part in and anything more than this would invade my spare time. I just don't have time for anything else. I know plenty of people that use these networks in the right way and it works for them. They might be multi-disciplined professionals and use Github, Dribble and Flickr for their work. They have multiple talents and need more than one network to share their work. A good reason then to on multiple social networks.

For others though I suspect there's more to having a massive list of social networks against their name. For others I think joining multiple networks is nothing more than a ego boost. I could be wrong but I've heard enough conversations about social networking to realise that there are people out there who see a long list of social networks to their name as nothing more than just an ego check.

People that want to be seen using the latest network, regardless of what the site or service does, are using that service for the wrong reasons. Joining networks due to popularity might be considered okay if you want to gain value from that particular network if you're a business owner or product owner and you can see a market in that network. Seeing a social network as the next big thing people will be talking about and joining it right away is not going to make you any more liked or respected. It's certainly not going to make your life anymore fulfilling.

It's sad to see people join so many different social networks just because they can. They're not a professional indicator and they're certainly not a masure of success. They're a time sink if you're not careful in managing your time on them.

I'd much rather see a carefully curated list of social networks against a person's name or profile. A list of networks that person takes part in and shares their creativity in those networks. A curated list of networks is an indicator that the person has taken the time to weed out those networks that are surplus to their needs and they've recognized the networks that benefit them.

That's the person who's site I like to read or follow. The person that would much rather focus on putting a short story together, publish some code or even show their sketchnotes for a talk they have attended. Their focus is on what they create, not putting their name on every social network they can join.

I'm four editions into my App.net newsletter and it has definitely been an eye-opener into running a regular publication. Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the process of putting together each newsletter and finding content to include, but there is a few areas where I could improve the newsletter and the process of putting it together.

Better user recommendations

This is a new section which only appeared in the third edition. The idea is that I monitor the new accounts being created on App.net and poll for a few days before the newsletter goes out. I filter for possible spam accounts and only include accounts that have been marked as 'human'.

On the weekend before the newsletter goes out I can then analyse the most active accounts for that week and pick out some recommendations for the subscribers of the newsletter.

There's so many parts of this process that can be improved:

1. Discount feed accounts - A lot of 'human' accounts are using tools like Twitterfeed to automate posting to their account. These are not the type of accounts I want to recommend.
2. Filter for users that don't have a bio - There's not much use in recommending somebody if they don't have their bio filled in telling people about themselves.
3. Automate the user polling script - I manually kick off a couple of scripts to poll the App.net API. Ideally this should take care of itself and just run on an interval. Nothing to stop me doing that on my laptop, but I should probably schedule it to start during the day when I know my MBP won't be in hibernation.
4. Scripting the users list - I put together the list of recommended users in the format of Markdown (like the rest of the newsletter), although there shouldn't be anything to stop me grabbing my list of recommended users and exporting it as a snippet of Markdown that can be included in the newsletter.

Conversation recommendations

I'm still undecided about this one, but another idea for App.net members was a service that reads back through your timeline for a given time period and weights conversations based on the number of replies, stars and reposts it gets. On a daily basis, subscribers would then get an email showing the most active conversations over that given time period.

I want to include this in the Netterpress newsletter, but on a per user basis it makes more sense to run it as a separate service. The idea could still be used in the newsletter, but instead of reading back on a specific user's timeline, it could poll the trending conversations feed and use that to search for active conversations.

More automation

I've already talked about automation earlier, but where I also want to automate the newsletter is the finding of new content. It's a manual job right now. I have included hashtags in the first two editions of the newsletter that people can use to tag their posts if it contains news that could be included in the newsletter, but the response to this has been limited.

Going well

So far the newsletter has shown me that putting a newsletter together involves a lot of work. It has been hard work balancing this with freelance work, but with more subscribers I could start blocking off more time during the day to getting an automated news discovery and publication process put together. It's still early days for the newsletter though, and I'm only halfway through the trial run.

Must catch up with The Clone Wars series before this comes on.

These are definitely one of the best brand of lights I've used for cycling. Great to see they're getting more and more powerful but still use USB to charge them.

Must check the LBS to see if they have the Blinder Arc 1.7 in stock. It would be great for son's bike.

Being effective is a seven point plan.

Thanks NB.