Matthew Lang

While trawling through my RSS feeds looking for blogs to unsubscribe from, I came across Andrew Chen's blog post about his decision to completely remove the RSS feed from his site.

As of today, I’ve removed the links the RSS feeds on this blog, and ultimately will phase them out completely in favor of email.

— RSS I quit you.. by Andrew Chen

Not a wise decision in my eyes and here's why.

Your inbox isn't an RSS reader

Using email to subscribe to web sites only works for a handful of blogs. You could comfortably subscribe to about five blogs and you would be able to manange reading a few emails a week from these blogs if they were not to frequent. Doing this for anything in the double digits number of blogs is a bad idea.

I don't want to flood my inbox with tons of emails from different blogs. Thats why I use RSS. That's why I use a RSS reader. I subscribe to the sites that I want to follow and then I can batch my reading of those sites to a time that suits me.

It's convenient and it works.

RSS isn't dead

Many people are starting to wonder if Google Feedburner will be next for the chop from Google but even if it was to be shut down, that's no indication to say that RSS is dying or dead. All it says is that Google isn't interested in dealing with a an RSS product.

RSS is alive and well everywhere. You can still find RSS feeds for millions of blogs and websites and Feedly are doing a great job of bringing over hundreds of people from Google Reader to their feed reading service. In the last few years there have a number of great RSS feed readers released on tablets and smartphones so that you read on the go.

Completely removing the RSS feed from your blog is a bad idea. After reading Andrew's post I found another website that I can unsubscribe from.

Sorry Andrew.

I had an idea for an application, so I stuck it into Journalong for later. Two seconds after saving it, I had another idea for an application. Put that in too.

I find this happens quite a lot. Ideas seem to breed more ideas in a short period of time and usually the ideas have something in common. In this case the applications I thought about building were very similar but for different audiences.

Whether I will do anything with them is another matter. The next step will be to flesh them out a bit more with a mind map and see if there is potential in the idea and ask myself some questions.

• Do I want to build this thing?
• Will I benefit from building it?
• Can I monetize this idea? (I ask myself this a lot these days)

If I can answer yes to all these questions, I'll start work on it or schedule it in for later if I'm currently busy. Always having a good side project to work on is a great way to keep on learning.

If I answer no to any of these the idea gets scrapped there and then.

This little workflow has worked well for me in the past. Weeding out the good ideas from the bad ideas means I spend less time on an idea that isn't going to benefit me in some way.

Today I spent an hour getting a script in place that will convert the Wordpress backup of my old Squarespace blog to Markdown posts so that I can pull them into my Octopress blog.

The script itself is almost there but one thing I noticed was how inherently easy it is to work with plain text.

For years I've had the chance of working with a number of different file formats. Some good, some bad. The good ones though were always the formats that contained little or no markup. Not only do they contain less markup, they also require simpler tools to work with them.

Plain text has that advantage.

One thing I will consider in the future when signing up to products and services on the web is how simple the data format is when I need to export data from that service. I'd rather not be wrestling with a difficult to work with file format when simpler formats already exists.

Not often you see one of these with the riser bars on it. Looks good.

via Pedal Consumption

My career has been quite varied when you look at the different sectors I've worked in. NHS, risk management, payroll, retail and technology repair and recycle. I've worked in a number of other different sectors as an ERP developer as well but largely these were for small periods of time where you rarely get a chance find out a lot about the domain of the business.

Since I started freelancing at the start of the year, I've been working largely on public health and information websites for NHS related organisations. Not only do I get to work with my favourite development tools and languages every day but I also get to work in my favourite domain. Health.

I don't know what the attraction is to health but I find it an interesting domain to work in. Providing tools for health organisations to share information with their patients so that they can lead healthier lives is quite rewarding in my view. Over the last couple of moths I've even found myself reading NHS related publications to broaden my knowledge of the work I am doing at the moment. I've never done that for any job that I to have had.

It's got me thinking about whether its worth specialising in health contracts or should I stick to working in different domains to keep things fresh? Working in different domains sure would broaden my experience and there might be another sector that I would be interested in. However health is already such a varied domain that could provide some diversity.

I suppose the real question is this. Which one will allow a steady income of work for the near future?

It's been a while since I went through all the incoming data I receive and did some house keeping on them. Over the last few weeks I've been increasingly adding more and more waves of content that come to me. Anything related to freelancing invariably gets added, but I'm now at the stage where I've spread myself to thin. There's podcasts I haven't listened to in the couple of weeks, books sitting on my reading list that haven't been bought, and RSS feeds that I need to unsubscribe from.

It's time to put up a breakwater.

Books

One technical book. One non-technical book.

That's the rule I employed a few years ago, but in the last year it's been thrown out the window and I've only been reading one book every few months. Part of the reason for this is that I've simply been distracted by other things. Home life, career, finances, programming, gaming, movies and other things have meant that I just haven't read as much. This isn't about limiting what I'm reading, but having more time to read by limiting other distractions.

Podcasts

Since I started freelancing I've been subscribed to a number of podcasts that focus on this topic and on the Ruby programming language. Truth be told, I haven't listened to anything on this topic in the last month. It's merely due to the length of the podcasts themselves. At over an hour each, I find it too long to listen to these. I'll be unsubscribing to all podcasts with the exception of three. I haven't decided which three yet, but I need to put a limit in place here if I'm to get any use out of them.

RSS Feeds

I'm currently sitting at just over one hundred RSS feeds in Feedly. Quite a lot if you ask me. My aim is to get this down to 50. Maybe two or three RSS feeds for each topic and selection of my favourites to take it to 50. I could never completely stop using RSS feeds. I find it such a convenient way of reading good content from my favourite blogs.

Half the feeds I simply skip over these days as I've found that some blogs just aren't that active anymore.

Subscriptions

This is paid subscriptions to things such as Railscasts or Caesura Letters.

I've got a couple of subscriptions in here that I could do without for the moment. Cutting the subscriptions back that I don't need at the moment would give me back time to be doing other things.

One thing I have found though is that the email subscriptions I have can largely replace some of the blogs that I am following. Although this does mean more emails hitting my inbox, but my email is quite healthy these days with everything labeled and routed to the appropriate folder when it arrives in my inbox.

I want to make things

Rather than digesting, I need to be producing. Whether it's a service, product, application or some writing, I'd much rather be making things than reading about what others are doing. In the past I've been guilty of worrying too much about what others think and maybe distracted myself with a dig into what's in my RSS feeds that day. Maybe it's time to get over that and simply produce something that will intentionally make people think.

I find it increasingly tiresome to apologize for my need to be alone to recharge, for reasons that echo why many women are tired of educating men about equality.

— If you want to get everything done, leave an introvert alone. by Pete Forde

I do my best work when I'm on my own and I'm disconnected. I'm not alone in this.

Be sure to click through for a couple of great posts that Pete mentions, especially Susan Cain's TED talk on the subject.

Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.

— A new system for reading by Roberto Estreitinho

Roberto's post was the catalyst for me to step back from subscribing to so many sources of content. Glad to be doing a cull now.

My fixie tends to be a fair weather bike these days, but the weather in Scotland is so unpredictable that it might be worth investing in these Pedal Consumption themed SmartAss mudguards.

via Pedal Consumption

I've just finished Seth Godin's book, Poke the Box and one thing has become abundantly clear. I'm not poking the box enough.

I've got a list of product ideas sitting on my desk and so far I've barely started three of them. In each case I've made the minimum number of steps to get each product idea started, but there needs to be more. There needs to be more poking.

Whether it's a prototype, a mock up or even beta version of the product, I need to get these product ideas out there. No excuses.