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UK broadsheets narrow view of syndication

Stuart Brown from the excellent Modern Life asks ‘Why is RSS adoption so abysmal amongst UK newspapers online ?’ with some interesting analysis including the staggering fact (to me at least) that Modern Life has more Bloglines subscribers than The Daily Torygraph.

The detailed analysis in this article interested me. I (delude myself that I) am technically literate. I subscribe to around 100 varied feeds and am very lazy. I live in the UK and am interested in News, Sport and Technology.

dangerous danger sign

This sign in my hotel room intrigued me. Every time I entered the bathroom, I gazed at the sign. I found myself entering the bathroom to study the sign when I didn’t actually need to use the bathroom.

Was the pipe hot or not ? Unfortunately, this towel rail wasn’t listed anywhere on this site. Could the temperature really be as high as 140’ F ? How hot is 140’ F ?

Finally, just before I checked out, I gave in to temptation, removed the towels and grabbed the silver rail with my right hand.

out of office

Thank you for your email. I am currently working in a bunker deep underground in the heart of Brussels (near Belgium).

I would normally say ‘Please call me directly on my mobile’. However, this secure facility is so secure that no mobile communications are possible.

I would normally pledge to replying to your email on my return. However, I am not quite sure precisely when (or even indeed, if) I ever will return. While I am not literally chained to the desk, the security officer is holding my passport which fills me with a sense of unease and practically equates to the same thing.

feed overload

From a posting in the Google Reader newsgroup

I have (approx) 383,240 feeds…

how to display Google shared items on WordPress

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha’s blog and awarding the article a (Gold) ‘Star’ in Google Reader.

But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to ‘Friends/Ex Colleagues’.

the art of lazy programming

Throw away that Mavis Beacon touch typing CD.

This hilarious video shows that speech recognition is the key to (not so) rapid application development.

Reminds me of working in tech support and the torture of spelling out Unix commands over the phone to customers.

conspiracy theories

When I returned from evensong last night, after I had ironed five shirts and read a bedtime story to my loving (but strangely uncommunicative) teddy bears, I sat down with a hot cup of Horlicks to enjoy two hours of high quality Sunday night viewing.

I don’t know why but I have always had an interest in ‘conspiracy theories’. When I was a lad, I was convinced that

• Marilyn Monroe was killed by the Kennedy brothers.
• Ashley Grimes was a undercover Manchester City spy.
• JFK was assassinated by Norma Jeane Mortenson from the grassy knoll.
• UFO’s had landed at Roswell and probably deposited Ashley Grimes.

Of course, that was then. This is now. Back then I was a boy. Now I am a man (sort of). With the passing years, I have matured and changed my beliefs accordingly.

am I a Google whore yet ?

‘OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.’

‘Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.’

Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC.

Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don’t use is Adsense.

resisting the lure of Google Reader

I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.

• Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles.
• Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news.
• Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn’t necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google’s shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke).
• Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for ’list view’ where articles are condensed apart from the current article and ’expanded view’ (all articles are expanded).
• Statistics - I can’t decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick.

Here’s a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface. I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.

fighting email spam on Blueyonder

In recent weeks, I have been peppered with increasing amounts of spam to my Blueyonder account despite the fact that I rarely use or divulge this email address.

I guess I have become spoiled by Akismet and Gmail which both do such a sterling job of automatically detecting spam.

Anyway, it turns out Blueyonder do have a spam filtering capability. If you log onto Webmail, under Options, there is a section called ‘Anti-spam and Antivirus Preferences’.