Archives for February 2006

Im on my way to San Diego again, yet another meeting with the dev team, but this time they have WIFI on the transatlantic flight from Denmark to Chicago, how cool is that?

Im supposed to be doing a little bit of work on some more serious stuff than telling you lot about how good the inflight internet is, but hell, i’ve not done this before and it IS cool heh… It wouldwould be fantastic for us to hook up with any members that are in the area though, so let me fill you in on the schedule for the next few weeks…

San Diego

So, im bound from Chicago to San Diego later today, and I have a whole week over there this time, with Chris joining me tomorrow sometime.

Do we have any Performancing members in the area that might like to hook up for a drink or something to eat? We’re dead pushed for time, but if anyone fancies it, i reckon a little time could be made for beers 🙂

SES with Andy Hagans

Im at Search Engine Strategies New York with Andy Hagans on the 1st of next month, where we’ll both be speaking at a session on tagging — the same one i had to miss in Chicago last year due to passport issues, so again if any one is going to be there, let us know.

New Communications Forum

After that, Im in Palo Alto for the New Communications Forum where i will be generally hanging out and catching up with a few folks. So again… if anyone is going from here, please let me know!

Im hoping to catch up with the folks from BlogHer, Tom Foremski and a whole heap of folks over the thursday and Friday, and will post about it seperately in the week as it really does deserve it’s own post!

As those that are paying attention to my occasional ramblings on travel will have guessed, we’re getting closer and closer to announcing our next tool for bloggers — when we’re ready, it’ll be on the homepage, so stay tuned…

We have mentioned a couple of times that we tend to have enormous feed subscriptions, despite our best efforts to keep the numbers manageable. Artem raised the question about how we manage these but no answers were forthcoming so I thought I would revive the topic here.

First my tool of choice

By now someone must have built the ultimate feed reading tool to beat all others?

I have been on a constant lookout for a great feed reader ever since I discovered RSS. Bloglines, sorry to the fans, just doesn’t do it for me. I use a web interface as a backup, not as my primary reading method.

Newsgator was ok but I found a better Outlook RSS plugin with Attensa. With Attensa I can sync with their web based service, this means my primary mode of RSS reading is available in addition to a roaming web interface, perfect. Well, almost. I had to spend a LOT of time with their very helpful staff to work out why it had nuked my Outlook install. All resolved now, happily.

How I manage my feeds

The one thing Attensa does not have that others I tried, such as Blogbridge and even Attensa’s own web based service, is the “river of news” view. If they added this to the Outlook tool I would be very happy in deed.

The way I work is to store my feeds in folders by “project” rather than topic. So feeds I read to find out the news that is relevant to Performancing go into a Performancing folder, good photography blogs go into my DSLRBlog folder, the best .NET blogs go into the folder for my techy blog etc.

I still have “second tier” folders for all the rest of the blogging news, but by shifting feeds into very paired down collections I am only looking at the good stuff, the ones I can really rely on. This saves me time as I am not wading through irrelevant stuff that might be fun but isn’t immediately useful.

An important folder contains all the non-blog feeds I keep up with, our BaseCamp projects, my Tadalists, etc. This is the main advantage of my feeds being in Outlook. I have outlook open all the time so if something new pops up I know right away.

Once I have got the important feeds out of the way and posted some (obviously brilliant and insightful) blog posts I can read the rest to keep abreast of news and catch up with what Dilbert is up to today and what is going to happen next on Battlestar Galactica.

If while looking through the other feeds I find a feed that looks like it will be useful I will move it. Looking through the feeds at this time also helps me find new blogs. I follow all the linked sources and have a look to see if I want to subscribe. Feeds I haven’t found useful for a couple of weeks get nuked. It’s like feed Darwinism, only the best survive.

You?

What software do you use and how do you manage your feeds? How many feeds do you subscribe to?

In my last post, I talked about how to find writing ideas using your web analytics package. Here’s a simple technique I used in Firefox, with the Performancing for Firefox extension, to set up several posts and increase my productivity.

Step 1: In your blog’s web analytics reports, find the one that shows the top search terms used to come to your site.

Step 2: Open up the PFF pane and make sure you don’t have a draft open.

Step 3: Highlight an interesting search word or phrase and drag it with your mouse into the “Title” field of PFF.

Step 4: Save the “stub” either by using CTRL-S or the “Save as Note” button.

Step 5: Now “Clear Content” and repeat steps 1-4 for the next search term that interests you.

I used this technique the last three days to drive up my productivity level – to as high as 14 posts (yesterday), over 4-6 blogs. What happens is that by building a collection of post stubs with suitable titles, you prep the background processes of your mind. You tell it that you are planning to write these articles, and your subconcious takes over  for your conscious mind.

If you use this technique often enough, and are clear on what you are writing about, it organizes your thoughts. Sometimes, you might even see an article in your head. Articles may appear to you immediately, or they may take a few days.

It has worked for me. I used this technique (without the PFF of course 🙂 about 4 years ago to produce ideas for 100 short stories, and 40 or 50 completed stories, in about a month, as well 900 pages of content for a computer programming book in 3 months, including editing.

It works, when I remember to use it. And with PFF, I’ve successfully used it for blogging. Provided you have a web analytics package, this is an effective way to drive up your blogging productivity while actually maintaining writing quality.

I was speaking with Tris earier this evening, and he drew my attention to a nasty little case of blog hijacking involving Blogger, and Gmail. According to his post about the hijacking, its been about 24hrs since the distraught blogger put in a help request to get Google to help her get her blog back, but still no help.

Come on Google, you should know better than this. When the shit hits the fan, someone needs to hustle before things get out of hand.

See Tris’ post for the full scary details, and if you have Blogger and Gmail account, start taking some steps to protect yourself from similar problems. Changing your password immediately would be a good first step, and reading Chris’ post on personal information would make an excellent 2nd step.