I was just reading an article from SitePoint (via their RSS feed, ironically) about maximising your social media time. I thought this little snippet was kinda funny:

Be Picky: I subscribe to a lot of feeds (well over 60), but I regularly review what I have coming in, and I’m ready to unsubscribe when I lose interest.

No matter which way I think about it, “well over 60” is not “a lot of feeds”. I thought I’d take a peek into my Google Reader stats:

From your 450 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 14,149 items, starred 278 items, shared 14 items, and emailed 0 items.

Hmmm. I don’t even think of 450 feeds as a lot. Some of them are aggregated, but on the other hand some of them are status feeds (Campaign Monitor, Google Alerts, Facebook etc). I know people who subscribe to far more.

Using Google Reader, I’m able to skim through all the items and flag what I want to read – and from the stats above, 278 items flagged out of 14,149 is 1.9% – and it doesn’t take more than about half an hour. It’s one of my early morning tasks and it’s something I enjoy a lot.

Of course, I have a massive backlog of flagged items that I want to read in more depth, but I like to think I’m saving them for rainy afternoons or plane trips or something.

The content of those feeds is massively varied – from tech blogs, comic strips, food blogs and photographers to music feeds (lots of music feeds) and a surprising number of non-geek blogs.

What about you? What’s in your feed reader?

Posted from kay lives here

Information Overload?

Image via Wikipedia

A couple of my Twitter contacts alerted me to this PledgeBank pledge by journalist and blogger Suw Charman-Anderson:

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

Well, being a woman in technology it’s hard not be interested by the topic, and of course Ada King, Countess of Lovelace is one historical character with a fair whack of geek cred. Being acknowledged as the first computer programmer in general makes also being the first woman in computing seem kind of insignificant in comparison – which is the way it should be. I also have a niece named in her honour.

So who’s with me? March 24 is a fair way away, so you’ve got plenty of time to think of a woman in technology who you admire. As one of the commenters on the PledgeBank page said, it’s going to be hard to pick just one!

Boing Boing says: Ada Lovelace Day needs your support!

Posted from kay lives here

Blog about women in tech for Ada Lovelace Day

When compiling my “week in ColdFusion” blog posts for SitePoint, I sometimes come across JavaScript “frame-busting” scripts that drive me around the bend. Let me explain…

After a long time as a FeedDemon user, I switched to Google Reader. Much as I love FeedDemon’s smart interface, I found more and more that I needed all my browser-based toys (extensions, social bookmarking tools, etc) close by. Grabbing links that I had flagged in FeedDemon to open in Firefox was slowing me down. I subscribe to over 200 feeds, so getting through them all quickly is important.

Google Reader is great, and with the Better GReader Firefox extension it’s even better (haw haw). I’m particularly a fan of the Preview button the extension adds, which lets you open the full page inline in Google reader. It’s great when working with partial feeds, like those delivered by Fullasagoog and MXNA – I can quickly check out the full post without leaving the comfort of Google Reader.

But there’s one annoying and rude “feature” of some blogs that is causing me grief – JavaScript which, on page load, checks if the site is being framed by another, and if so, busts it out into the full window. This is annoying because when I use the preview function in Google Reader, sites with this script replace my current Google Reader window with the full site in question and I lose my place in what I was doing.

I can understand why people don’t want their content being framed by another site – but people, it’s 2008, you make the content in your feeds freely available and it gets repurposed in so many ways it’s not funny. Trying to control how a site is viewed is rude and pushy, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s making it hard for me to bookmark, Digg or otherwise share the content, which is to the site’s detriment. It goes against the open and flexible nature of the semantic web.

I do acknowledge this is partially a browser issue – my browser should stop rogue sites from misbehaving in ways I don’t like. Unfortunately neither Firefox 2 nor 3 offer this level of control, the Preview Greasemonkey script does not yet include this functionality (although it has been suggested) and using a JavaScript blacklist extension like YesScript on just offending sites stops my bookmarklet tools from working on these sites as well, which really defeats the purpose.

So let’s all share the love and drop the 1999-style frame-busting scripts. How about it?

Posted from kay lives here

Annoying blog trait: please stop trying to hijack the browser window

At the beginning of January the Aussie Bloggers Forum was officially launched, followed by the Aussie Bloggers blog on the 21st. I read about the forums and wandered on over… and found a group of awesome, interesting people of varying levels of experience with blogging, talking about everything from WordPress plugins to monetisation to getting inspiration to what’s for dinner! Somehow I got stuck, and have been there pretty much ever since. I do have a soft spot for forums. In a kind of “if you’re gonna hang around here all the time, you might as well do something useful” deal, the forum administrators have made me a moderator, although I have yet to wield my mighty new powers.

The forum is not just for Australians – anyone who is interested in blogging at any level is welcome to join. And there’s a really nice bunch of people over there.

Today, being Australia Day, the Aussie Bloggers blog is featuring an interview with Darren Rowse, probably Australia’s most famous ProBlogger. Check it out!

Posted from kay lives here

Aussie Bloggers Forum: for bloggers at every level

I have a web standards blog. I haven’t had time to give it much love lately. I’m thinking of killing it off, merging the articles there with the archives of this blog, and redirecting requests the old domain to this one.

There’s a few reasons for this (which I actually explain over there: Time to retire). When I started it, halfway through 2005, it was because I was very involved in the local Web Standards Group and as I was being aggregated by both Fullasagoog and MXNA, web standards and accessibility and CSS seemed off-topic for this blog. There was quite a bit of hostility towards web standards in the old-school coders community. I was almost embarrassed about talking about those kinds of issues here.

Since then though, that’s changed a lot. There’s no longer a question of “are CSS layouts better than table layouts”, and for the most part, there’s no longer any doubt among the general web development community that web standards are the way to go and that accessibility is a good thing for everyone. And blogging about the odd web standards issue (because there’s fewer of of them now anyway) does not seem like some kind of faux pas anymore.

So over to you. Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Do you object to the occasional post about web standards, usability, accessibility and the like, which may not tie directly into ColdFusion? Does talk of web standards send you into a silent (or not so silent) rage? Leave a comment and let me know!

Posted from kay lives here

Time to kill off web standards?