Pocket Revolutionary

Just a quick post to tell anyone who cares that I’ve finally picked a real method for managing my growing RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. My first advice is to get a real RSS reader, of course. Something that lets you categorize your feeds, either NetNewsWire (I paid for it, but now it’s free), NewsFire, Google Reader, etc. You have to break up your feeds at least a little bit.

Special Folders

First, I threw online comics and my daily deals like woot! into their own folders. When I want to read today’s Dilbert, I’m not in the mood to look through a lot of news feeds, and the same goes for my daily MacUpdate promos. I look at those early in the morning on my iPhone, normally. I need to be able to jump on those woot! deals first thing, you know?

The River

Next, I created a folder I just call “The River”. This has almost all of my feeds in it, and I look through it once or twice a day as a quick glance through everything going on in the world that I might care about. It’s basically a fire hose of information, and undoubtedly, I might miss something, but I’m okay with that. I scan through all the headlines spending about a second on each one. If something is remotely interesting, I’ll open it. If I accidentally miss something and it disappears, it will probably be duplicated on one of the other blogs in the river. This actually gives me the freedom to throw even more feeds into the river. Since I’m scanning everything, throwing more feeds in just allows me to have a bigger view of the world and spot more trends as they are repeated. I can easily have two or three-hundred items in this feed to glance through without feeling any stress at all.

Heavy Hitters

Finally, I’ve pulled a small handful of feeds into a special folder I call the “Heavy Hitters”. The heavy hitters are bloggers whose articles I will always read. I don’t want them lost in the river, because I know that I’ll read every word they write. This is only a half-dozen writers for me. I probably know them personally, and they aren’t just “aggregators” of other blogs. Because of this, I will probably only have five or six posts show up in this folder on most days.

My Secret Weapon

Of course, my not-so-secret weapon is the NewsGator service. Because I use NetNewsWire on my laptop, it syncs up automatically with NewsGator online. It just happens that NewsGator has my favorite iPhone interface for reading RSS feeds. So, I end up reading everything on my iPhone about 80% of the time and just “clipping” the few articles that are too long or use Flash video that I can’t watch on my iPhone.

37signals posted an article that echoes some of my own thoughts from this very blog:

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

[via Signal vs. Noise]

Okay, so we went to see Expelled last weekend, and since most of my blogging cabal was there, I agreed with John and Neil that we would all blog about it. You can read their comments here and here. I wanted to blog, but I was way too deep into our foray into the fun of online streaming conferences at Generals. So, now I can finally get around to saying that I thought it was a great movie and I’d highly recommend it. Was it filmed a little like propaganda? Maybe. Was it a little heavy-handed? Maybe. It doesn’t matter, though. Why? Because the point of the movie was to take on the lack of freedom forced upon us by science and the media. It had an hour and a half to beat the point in, because the organizations on the other side of the issue seem to have the other twenty-two and a half hours every day to make their point. Sure Richard Dawkins was not given the entire movie to explain his beliefs and he was reduced down to some quick interviews and sound bites, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Dawkins has every opportunity through his books, television interviews, television guest spots, etc. to spout his beliefs to anyone interested. I’ve heard him complain about the movie, but it’s ridiculous because he is in no way under-represented in today’s media. He has more opportunity than anybody else in that film to speak his mind, so I don’t see it at all unfair if he wasn’t given an entire hour to explain himself. So, no matter what your personal beliefs about the origin of humanity, I recommend you see this movie. If it does nothing else, it will at least give you a little perspective on freedom in the scientific community that you won’t hear anywhere else.

Robert Lemke is launching a new video podcast about TYPO3 5.0, FLOW3, and other TYPO3 news. I’m looking forward to it as I’m downloading the first two videos (two evening session from T3BOARD). You can check out his announcement here or go straight to the podcast page.

[via buzz.typo3.org]

If you haven’t already discovered the recent blog Stuff Christians Like (which he does admit is a rip-off of Stuff White People Like), I highly recommend it. If you need a place to start, I can recommend: #133: Refusing to paint my mural, #137: Holding retreats at locations that could double as horror movies, and #9: Comparing Braveheart to Christianity.