Dealing with the Overload
Since moving to a different department at work, one that requires me to be away from my desk for a good portion of the day, I’m finding that I’m being far more selective about how I get my information.
Where it used to be common for me to get all of my feeds caught up completely, I’m finding that I’m more likely to just check one or two feeds and then move on. My primary point of contact now is Twitter, and maybe FriendFeed, although if that gets to be too much as well, I’m going to have to cull the number of feeds that I’m subscribed to there as well.
This is not the way it was supposed to be.
RSS was supposed to be something that made it a lot easier to get access to the information that you wanted, on your terms. Right now Google Reader has 45 subscribed feeds, including the Friendfeed one, which pulls in about 5 feeds on its own. And I can’t keep up. So I’m going to cut even more, although I don’t really want to.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying that I always have to get completely caught up with my feed reading in order to feel like I’ve accomplished something. Hardly. But I feel like I’m missing something if I don’t at least make a bit of an effort.
Evidently I need to lower my expectations, and look for more quality stuff. Twitter won’t be cut back at all, because that’s just a matter of starting the client and starting fresh. But for feeds, I’m going to be dropping quite a few, and just keeping the stuff that I consider to be crucial to bringing me the information that I want.
So, how do you deal with the overload?
Upgrading Wordpress Plug-ins the Easy Way
One of the great features that got introduced an earlier version of Wordpress was a plug-in that would actually check and notify you when newer versions of other plug-ins became available. Then it was just a simple matter of downloading the new plug-in, copying it over the old one, and calling it done.
But since Wordpress 2.5 was released, there’s a way to have it do the upgrades for you automatically, although you will need to allow the system to FTP directly into your account. I decided to give it a try, and it worked flawlessly. Without a doubt, it’ll make things a whole lot easier for some users who won’t want to take the trouble to upgrade their plug-ins manually.
Doing it manually is obviously a better method, for security reasons, but it’s nice to know that the feature is there if you just need to run a very quick update on a plug-in.
“Forced” Ads That Can’t Be Removed Suck
The other day I started looking for a new theme to use here at RTdN because I’d paid for the theme that was currently installed, and I wanted to use it on a different site. So the hunt began for a new look.
I thought that I’d found one, and I made it the active theme for a few hours while I worked on getting my ads configured in the footer. But when I opened the footer.php file, I was greeted with a copyright notice and a warning that any attempt to reverse engineer or decrypt the file was prohibited. Following that was a long string of encrypted gibberish set inside PHP brackets.
Uh, okay. I’ll just add my ads after that and give it a test. Hmmm….that didn’t work. I see other ads, though. Not ones I usually see. I decided to put the ads above the rest of the text in the file. Nope, that didn’t work either. Couldn’t see my ads. So I made the decision to remove all of the other text and just put my ads in the footer file. Upon reloading, not only were the ads not visible, but something in the CSS was now broken, and the site looked like garbage.
Putting the text back in made the author’s ads come back, and the CSS was now fine.
Needless to say, that theme is gone. I don’t mind an author putting links to their site or wherever to get a little credit, but there’s no way your ads are going on my site. Any ads that appear on RTdN are going to be by choice, and I’m going to have the final say.
It really is a shame, too, because I really liked the theme. But if I can’t use it in the way I want, I won’t use it at all.
That’s It for iGoogle
In the last couple of days I decided that I’d try using iGoogle as my start page in Firefox, rather than just the plain old Google page. I’d set it up in the past, so it was already populated with some stuff that I’d previously chosen.
This morning I went to add feeds from a couple of other sites that I wanted to follow on the page - Anywired and Zen Habits. But when I went to add the feeds, the app claimed that it couldn’t find those feeds. Excuse me? These are Feedburner feeds, so they’re even owned by Google (not that probably means a whole lot, though).
Then I tried to add my own feed. Nope. Can’t find that either. So, uh, what’s going on Google? I’ve decided to just go back to using the plain old Google page for a day or two to see if it’s a temporary glitch. If it is, I’ll give the iGoogle setup another shot. Otherwise, maybe I’ll look at something else. Netvibes, for example.
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