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.

Matt Gemmell has an excellent post on the community that has built up around App.Net and why he'd like you to consider joining.

The practical effect, which I notice daily, seems to be that people are more willing to participate in conversations, and also more careful about how they express themselves. Such a broad generalisation has no hope of being true for everyone, but it’s been my consistent perception during the months I’ve been using the service.

— App.Net for conversations by Matt Gemmell

Content is king. I hear this a lot when people refer to what drives the popularity of their blog. Which is okay when your blog is targeted as a specific audience, but does the same rule apply when your blog is personal?

Let me re-phrase that. Is your blog for you or your readers?

I've been very much of the mind that my blog has an audience. Not a specific audience but an audience all the same. My audience likes what I write. Since moving to Octopress though, I have been struggling about what to do with the content of my tumblelog. My heart says to include all the content here, but my head says no.

My tumblelog is a mixed bag of stuff including fixies, tech news and an assortment of links to my favourite posts on the blogs that I like to read. I like posting these things as it's what I like, but I'd still like to continue with a daily essay style post.

One way to maintain two audiences but in the same blog is to provide another RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. One feed will default to only the daily posts that I write while another feed will provide the full assortment of posts to enjoy. This way I hope to blog for myself but also keep the interest of readers in mind by not polluting their feed with posts they don't want to read.

If you continue to enjoy the daily posting routine of myself then stick with the current RSS feed. If you want something more varied then why not think about subscribing to the full assortment of stuff I'll be posting? The new feed will be ready early next week and of course I'll be posting the details here.

Google free. I hear those words a lot now. Ever since Google decided to close down the Google Reader service there's been a question I keep asking myself. What's next in the Google product list to be closed? And I don't think I'm alone. There's been a lot of discussion about how long term other Google services will be? One thing's for sure. Nothing lasts forever.

Rather than sitting waiting though, I've decided to look for alternatives to the products and services that I can. I'm not aiming to go completely Google free, but I am looking to reduce my dependency on the services and software that Google provides.

The Browser

It was a tough choice to make, but I decided to stop using Google Chrome. Yes it's fast and probably the alpha browser for many web developers, but given that I want to stop relying on Google services and products, I had to look elsewhere. Well not too far, after all Mozilla Firefox is a great alternative to Google Chrome. I was up and running within a few minutes with Firefox thanks to the ability to import all my bookmarks and browsing history from Chrome.

Analytics

Site tracking services such as Google Analytics have a bit more of a wide range of options than browsers do. In the end though I decided to use Github's Gauges service. It's simple and cheap. I don't need all the metrics that Google Analytics provides, just a general overview of traffic to my site. A couple of code changes to my own site and the Journalong site was all that was needed to start using Gauges.

Feedburner

Lastly there's Feedburner. Given that Google are no longer interested in providing a service that allows you to read RSS feeds, then I think that a service that publishes RSS feeds is going to be closed down in time as well. Already I have read of a couple of people on ADN who have stopped using their Feedburner accounts and are using the built-in RSS feed that their sites provide.

I haven't found an alternative service to Feedburner but I'm not sure that I actually want one. Subscription stats for my blog isn't something that I am interested in that much, but one thing I will miss about Google Reader is it's trends page. I just want to see how active a blog has been in the last 3 months so that I can decide if I want to unsubscribe from it. I'll be switching away from Feedburner soon.

These are the services that I have decided stop using with Google. What difference does it make? Not much, but I am happier not relying on one provider for all the products and services I use online.

Being a parent is tough at the best of times, but being a parent, holding down a job and working on anything else that takes your fancy is hard too. As a developer I like tinkering with code and ideas, but these aren't a priority and so I only work on side projects when I can. However, even short bursts of coding can be productive as John Polacek points out:

It has happened to me over and over again. I get away from what I’m working on, then when I come back, I focus on it in a fresh way. I can accomplish in 10 minutes what may have taken me an hour or more had I just stayed ‘heads down’.

— How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer by John Polacek

My focus is family first, income second and then everything else. So only when I have exhausted all my options about the house do I crack open my text editor and start coding. I might only get 10 minutes or half an hour, but it's all I need to move project forward.

The surprise for me is that I thought that with freelancing I would be able to set aside some time for side projects, but the priority for freelance work is to simply save what I can. When the work stops coming in for a short spell, then I can focus on my side projects for a period of time until I find other work. For the moment though I'm happy to only work on side projects when I can.

For a while now I've been running an essay style blog and a tumble log. They've both got a fair number of subscribers, but one of the complications I have is that in moving my blog somewhere else is that I need to decide whether to bring both blogs over separately, combine them or just bring my essay style blog.

Combining the blogs might mean that I lose readers, but then the offset is that I am brining two audiences together and hopefully they will like the bringing together of content.

Maintaining separate blogs could be a pain, in fact it is a pain. I think I'd like to simply maintain the one blog for the moment.

Bringing my essay style blog over is the most appealing one but letting go of my tumble log might be a bit difficult to do. It's quite personal to me as it contains topics and stuff that interests me personally. However it is only a blog after all.

The loss of Google Reader as an RSS reader is a great shame but one thing that I am definitely going to miss is the trends page of Google Reader. This page provided data on what you've been reading and when you were reading it. Not only that but you could see what blogs you are following are active and which are not.

I use the last feature as a way of unsubscribing from blogs that are no longer active. Every month I look back to see which blogs were not active over the last three months and unsubscribe from them.

So now that Google Reader is being killed off, what do I do about the tracking of the blogs that I follow?

Due to the lack of products that I could find that do this, I thought about rolling my own RSS watch list so that I could see which blogs were not active over a given time period.

The idea is simple. You upload your OPML file of your RSS feeds and the watch list will monitor your feeds on a daily basis always checking to see when content on each blog feed was last posted. Alerts are emailed to you when a feed stops posting after a number of days that you specify.

A simple idea and one that I hope that I can build in the next few weeks.

A few weeks ago I signed up to a project that involved receiving regular index cards through the post with ideas and suggestions for those ideas on them.

In the last few weeks I've spotted a few more opportunities where this idea could be used and I hope that more of these micro mail services pop up.

In a digital world it is all too easy to be overburden ourselves with content and networks. Twitter, Facebook, email, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and more. Where do we draw the line?

This why I'm loving the idea of getting mail again. A chance to stop relying on digital content and subscribe to some real hand crafted content. The kind of content that really makes you stop and think.

I really hope that more of the micro mail services take off.

Love the paint job on this Pista.

via FGGT

A few weeks back I tried to improve some code I was working on, but after a couple of hours I resided myself to the fact that it just couldn't be done in that small space of time.

Yesterday I looked at the same code and within half an hour managed to make a big improvement to it. So what was the difference between yesterday and a few weeks ago?

It could have been a number of different things. What was my workload like that morning? Did I have other things on my mind? Did I start the day with tea or coffee? Who knows. Hundreds of different factors could have affected my thinking that day.

When you're working you focus as much attention and energy as you can on delivering what is expected of you. Some days though you just need that bit longer to get your head round something.

We can't always be thinking and working 100% effectively all of the time. What I do know is I can't be switched on all the time.

via Singletrack

Ever that get that feeling where you're continually picking up pace with work and you get faster and faster at getting through your list of tasks? The last few days have been like that with my work for a client. Fast paced work, getting things done. Great for the client when you can carry out the changes they need quickly.

However there comes a time where this pace of work becomes counter-productive. While I can recall the details of each code change I made for the client, I wonder if I'll still remember those changes next week? Have I spent enough time reviewing each of the changes I made? Are there enough tests to cover the code changes I made? Could the code have been refactored in a beneficial way?

Getting things done is great, but getting things done correctly is even better. Checking things off from your list is great, but a review of the work for a few minutes is even better as it could lead to you finding something that you might have missed. Don't forget to review the work you do to ensure that it's your best work that you can deliver.

Yes it's that time again where I consider moving to another blog platform. Over the last few years I've tried Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Octopress and now I am currently on Squarespace.

The key benefit for me at the moment is that I can have two active blogs sitting on one site without having to separate them into different sub-domains. However I am wondering about merging my two blogs back into one so this isn't a big influence on the decision. What I do want is ease of deployment and a bit more control over my blog.

In the last few weeks I have just about nailed the setup on my favourite text editor and it now doubles up as my main tool for writing in Markdown. Squarespace does support Markdown, but I wish I had an easier way of posting to my blog.

Octopress is calling again, it did have a nice easy way of publishing, but I like the ability to post from the web which Squarespace does allow.

Hmm, a tough decision.

Test-driven development (TDD) is often seen as the long way to developing software. The misconception perceived by many is that writing tests and code is going take longer than simply writing code. While this statement is in fact true, many don't take into account the what's happens further down the development process.

Developers that practice TDD are continually writing tests to ensure that all parts of the software work. This practice reduces the chances of bugs appearing in the code in a later date. Developers that don't practice TDD are writing code that is usually handed to another team for testing. Chances of the code containing bugs at this point are quite high, and so a game of ping pong ensues with the code moving between the developers and the testers until it is working. This can ultimately take longer than the time it took a developer to produce the same code using TDD.

Selling TDD to clients is difficult because they don't see the benefit of this practice. Clients want their product and the want it now. Writing tests takes too long. It puts the developer in a difficult position. Do you take the gig and hope to squeeze in the tests as your developing and hope the client doesn't notice? Or do you take the gig and forgot about the tests knowing that future work will come back to you in the form of bugs that the client has discovered? Of course the last alternative is to not take the gig at all.

The long path that clients see when they are told about TDD isn't as long they think it is. In fact it is actually worth their while to spend the time investing in tests that ensures their code for their product or service continues to work in the future. Following the path of not writing tests might look like the short path to start with but there's no guarantee that it will stay that way.

Then tune in every day to Nicholas Bate. I especially like the last one on the routes to more business list:

Never, ever, ever allow yourself to doubt that you can get a bigger slice of the pie.

What do I need to anticipate?

What do I need to do better?

What do I need to do differently?

Read the rest of NB's great series, jagged thoughts for jagged times.