David Emery OnlineSane RSS usage
RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. I don’t mean that you’re using it in a way it wasn’t intended — rather, you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you.1
You should be able to go on a disconnected vacation for three days, come back, and be able to skim most of your RSS-item titles reasonably without just giving up and marking all as read. You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles.
I disagree with a lot of the points both Marco and Jacqui are making here – mostly that it’s possible to use RSS “wrong”. It’s akin to saying that everyone should stop using SMS as that can be distracting – it’s using your phone “wrong”.
I am a heavy RSS user, but I find it immensely useful. According to Google Reader I’m currently subscribed to 990 feeds and have read over 50,000 items in the last 30 days, but I find this in no way stressful or counter productive. I follow some feeds that average over 100 posts per day, and some that don’t even post once every month. You can use RSS this way, and in fact I’d argue that it’s the best source of news you could ever come up with.
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some good pieces of advice in their two articles. Firstly, I don’t check my feeds all day – that would be impossible. RSS is not twitter, and it’s not really best I don’t think for real time news (although you could use it for that if you wanted). What it’s best for is assembling a custom built newspaper of all your interests, or at least that’s how I treat it. Roughly 3 times a day – in the morning, at lunch and in the evening – I check my feeds, and skim through them exactly as I would a newspaper. The articles allude to a fear of marking all as read which is ridiculous – does any one really read a newspaper cover to cover, every word? RSS is the same, a source of interest to flick through and dip into, not to labour over like email.
Visit ➔Apple's iTunes Match beta doesn't technically stream music
Despite evidence that appears to show streaming playback through iTunes Match, an Apple spokesperson confirmed to Peter Kafka of All Things D that content played from the service must first be "stored" on an iPhone or iPad. The service appears to be streaming because it begins playback instantly, but instead of true streaming it is downloading and storing the file while beginning simultaneous playback.
"Apple's system, as it's currently constructed, still requires users to keep stuff on their machine in order to play with it," the report said. Kafka speculated that files that are not "downloaded" through iCloud but still played will sit in a "temporary cache" on the machine.
The semantics of this are pretty ridiculous – every major streaming service works in the same way, using a local cache. iTunes Match is streaming just as much as Spotify is.
And it’s also not very surprising that iTunes Match does supports streaming – it’ll be interesting to see what other features it gains before it launches (my bet: a web based version of iTunes, alongside a whole new version on the desktop).
Visit ➔Introducing geofences on Flickr!
Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your “home” or “school” that only allows “Friends and Family” to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area. So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the default geo privacy you’ve designated for that hotspot.
This is great for two reasons 1) it’s an obviously useful but also nifty feature 2) Flickr is innovating again; I was getting worried that they might not have it in them any more.
Visit ➔Twelve steps for saving webOS
10) Make sure that webOS apps can also run on other platforms. That’s in the browsers of that platform, of course. User has nice webOS app and shows it to a friend who uses Android. User sends app via Bluetooth, friend can open and use it straight away in the Android browser. That is the true strength of the web platform; a strength you should capitalise on.
WebOS could become something really interesting if they went down this route (and truly live up to this name). Although – and people forget this – Apple is already quite a long way down this path. I find it a little odd when you see articles along the lines of “HTML5 breaks the App Store lock-in” and the like; maybe it does, but only because Apple lets it.
In fact, not only is Apple letting HTML5 apps work on iOS, they’re positively encouraging them by letting them work as proper apps and pushing ahead with WebKit developments (like hardware accelerated animations, for example) to make them work better then on any other mobile platform.
Visit ➔The futility of QR codes on Tube adverts
Travelling on the London Underground ‘Tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QR code, I am not too sure if this is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web’: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be.
The explosion of QR codes on adverts, almost all of which are completely useless, really does show how little some advertisers think through what they’re doing.
I particularly like the ones I regularly see on the large posters on the other side of the track on tube platforms, which are almost always too far away to work – are you supposed to jump onto the rails to scan a QR code to visit some movies Facebook page? And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s displayed in one of the only places left 100% guaranteed not to have any form of internet connection…
Visit ➔Adapted
That left a third option, and it was after a few (decaf) lattes and advice from Ethan, that I decided the best thing to do was compromise for now. Let’s keep the same content and code that’s been powering the large-screened version that Dribbble has always been, and then let’s do something adaptive to it—using media queries to effectively make the site fluid and as vertical as possible when rendered at 480px wide and smaller. In other words, let’s take a step towards a responsive design by crafting an adaptive stylesheet that overrides the master to make things usable and readable on phones and small-screened things. Our tiny team can continue to maintain just one codebase.
A good reminder that even if – because of constraints that probably apply to 99% of web projects – you can’t do everything perfectly, doing a bit is better then nothing.
Visit ➔Why You Must Code
First, let me state my opinion up front: if you are making a living using computers, and in your area consider yourself an “expert,” you should know how to program.
Simple. If you are a “social media” expert, a “product person,” and especially anything tied to the Internet, you should be able to program. It doesn’t mean that you will do it for a living, but you should know how, and do so regularly, if only to keep skills up.
I agree wholeheartedly with this – you don’t need to be able to do anything properly complicated, but you should have a grounding in how it all works underneath.
Visit ➔Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook.
Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.
This seems like a big loss to the digital publishing world; there’s no doubt that Push Pop Press had the best eBook tech out there, and it seems a shame that this won’t get further use.
On the other hand, it’s very interesting that Facebook are aggressively hiring amazing designers at the moment – with their resources, they could come up with something really interesting. It would be very easy for them to rest on their laurels and simply keep iterating Facebook.com, but it feels like they’re aiming much higher then that.
Visit ➔How Social Media Is Hurting Your Ability To Obtain New Fans
Using Google+ as a marketing tool is EXACTLY THE SAME as using Facebook or Twitter; while they’re might be small differences with the interface or how to specifically do something, the actual value in using them only comes from exactly how you use it. Do you post interesting an engaging content? Do you thank fans and respond to them? Do you make being a fan or follower a rewarding experience? Awesome, your doing the right things.
The problem is, most musicians are not doing this. Nope, they sign up for each and every new thing thinking that JUST BECAUSE it’s the new thing, thinking it’s going to help them. So they post songs, spam friends with events, do the whole “wave my hands in the air look at me” typical bullshit, and then sit on the porch and pout because they don’t have any new “fans”.
I do love a good rant, although he does lose the point a bit when he starts talking about Digg and Reddit – those places are great for getting lots of traffic, but it’s not necessarily the kind of traffic you want.
Visit ➔Web Typography for the Lonely
Web Typography for the Lonely aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.
All of this is awesome.
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