Twitter vs. Feed Reading

This weekend, Luis wrote about his information diet1 in the wake of Google Reader’s impending closure. While reading his post, I thought about my own feed reading pattern.

I hear lots of people say that Twitter has replaced feed reading for them. I don’t think that works for me, for several reasons:

  1. I like having a casual relationship with Twitter. I don’t want to feel like I have to read everything in my stream for fear of missing something. On days like today when I have meetings all afternoon, I will completely ignore Twitter.
  2. I don’t want certain stuff in my Twitter feed. There are news sources that I like to skim (then mark all as read) in my feed reader that I don’t want in my Twitter feed. Twitter is still personal to me. Most of the people I follow are folks I am friends with.2 Twitter is an intentional distraction for me and I don’t want it to be more than that.
  3. Feed reading is great for following sites that post infrequently, but have great stuff. This morning’s post by Charles Miller is a great example. In many ways, it’s the best tool I’ve found for what I really want: following interesting people.3

I haven’t made a choice for my next feed reader server-side service yet, but I am happy with Reeder for iOS and Mac so I’m likely to stay with something it is compatible with. At the moment this means Feedbin, but I’m also considering self-hosting something. I’d love an Open Source parsing/crawling back-end that implemented Google Reader’s API; plus Reeder adding support for setting a custom API endpoint URL.

Whatever solution I end up going with, feed reading isn’t going to leave my daily workflow anytime soon.

  1. I had culled my feed list and added a few new sources a few months ago, after letting my sources stagnate for years. ↩
  2. I use lists to track business acquaintances, topics, etc. ↩
  3. I would really love, and have played with the idea of building, an app/service that is people centric instead of service/content centric. Aggregate content from social networks, blogs, GitHub activity, etc. and allow me to choose what content from each person I want to subscribe to. Along those lines, I’d love to make my website the owner of that source of data lists… a simple JSON API that returns information about my available content. ↩

Why We Should Teach Programming →

Hadn’t thought of programming this way before but I completely agree. One big example for me is with legal contracts. Thinking of them as “this part does this, this part does that” makes them much easier to understand and negotiate.

Where polyglotism and “right tool for the job” goes awry →

One of the things I enjoy most is incorporating a good idea from one language/project/etc. into another (obviously, you need exposure to other languages/projects/ideas to do this). You can see examples of this in the code I’ve written that interacts with WordPress and how it’s adopted more of an MVC style over time.

I suppose the upside of spending a few hours debugging something is learning how a bunch of code you didn’t write actually works.

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“Dad said ‘no’, but I’m going to do it anyway.” At least it was said cheerfully.

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Capsule Hotkeys and Background Queue

It’s been very gratifying to see people continuing to discover Capsule this week, and seeing it resonate with them. This was typed into the demo earlier today:

This software is an example of a thing that everyone wants but doesn’t exist until a great idea suddenly comes and voila! it appears!

There are a couple of new features committed to GitHub that you can play with if you like.

Hotkeys

In the feature/hotkeys branch1 in the ui submodule, you’ll find some additional keyboard shortcuts:

  • shift+h = navigate to home
  • shift+n = new entry
  • shift+f = set focus to search field

Make sure to update submodules as the jQuery Hotkeys library has been added.

Capsule Server Queue

In the feature/queue branch you’ll find an implementation of a very basic “send at least once” queue so that pushing posts to Capsule Server is no longer a blocking action (it makes saves faster). Another benefit to this feature is better support for using Capsule while offline. Saved entries are stored in the queue and sent to Capsule Server once Capsule is online again. To test this out, you’ll need to update your Capsule Server to the latest code in the develop branch.

We’ve also fixed a few bugs and incorporated a few submitted enhancements. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

  1. We use the excellent Git Flow model at Crowd Favorite. Features are implemented in feature branches before being merged back to develop and subsequently into a release. ↩

Awesome Web App/UI Designer Wanted (Contract)

My team and I are building a new web application and are looking to collaborate with a UI designer to help us bring it to life. You understand that a great application is one that delights the user with its elegance and ease of use. You have reasons for your decisions and enjoy the opportunity…

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Seriously PayPal? I generate a secure 20 character password and I’m not allowed to paste it in? (I used the inspector to hack in the value anyway.)

PayPal Idiocy

This post is part of the thread: Passwords – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

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GitHub’s online editor (Ace, the same one we use for Capsule) is super handy for quickly tweaking things after accepting a pull request.

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