Rubénerd!

In the spirit of @Jeorgina consolidation, I decided to see if SeaMonkey could also be used as a Google Reader replacement!

Many of these tips should also work in Thunderbird, but I haven't tested it. Feel free to leave a comment with your own experiences if you choose to try it out!

Setting it up for feeds

SeaMonkey Mail (SMM) works around the concept of accounts. Much as you would create a new email or newsgroup account, to subscribe to web feeds you create a special "Blogs and Newsfeeds account."

1. Navigate to File → New → Account
2. Choose "Blogs and News Feeds"
3. Give it any arbitrary name. I was boring and called it "Feeds"

In your SMM sidebar, you should now see an account with the familiar square orange web feed icon alongside your mail and newsgroup accounts. Consolidation and simplification to the MAX! ^_^

Subscribing to feeds

As I found with Google Reader, creating folders to organise your feeds is easier to do before you subscribe to feeds.

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "New Folder"
3. Give it a unique name, and optionally choose a parent folder. Yes, you can have a hierarchy, such as "apple" under "tech"! Take that Google Reader!

Then its simple enough to subscribe to feeds:

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "Subscribe"
3. Enter the feed URL, and choose a folder to download them to.
4. Optionally, you can also hit Import to download feeds from an OPML file, pretty slick!

Caveats

One thing that caught me out initially was that SMM downloads article from feeds into folders like email, rather than just displaying them in folders like Google Reader. As Mozilla notes:

Removing or changing the folder for a feed will not affect previously downloaded articles.

If you decide to change the folder for a feed, this just means you need to drag and drop any previously downloaded entries into the new folder as well.

Thoughts

I've been using SMM to read all my web feeds for about two weeks now, and so far it's been a more than capable replacement for Google Reader. Having my feeds in the same window as my newsgroups and email accounts has also been so gosh darn convenient!

Downloading and using SeaMonkey (or Thunderbird) just for web feeds might be overkill, but if you already use it, give it a try with your feeds. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself :)

Every year or so I like to remind people that if they're still subscribed to my old web feed to please update their blog aggregator:

rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ → rubenerd.com/feed/.

In April 2009 I moved domains, and two years and one month later Google Reader is still reporting 45 people are subscribed to the old feed. I appreciate your readership more than perhaps life itself, but if you could do me a favour and resubscribe with the new address, then unsubscribe from the previous one, I'd really appreciate it! Why doesn't Google do this for us automatically?

I'll still keep it registered, but one of these days I'd love to retire that old domain with all its redirects, and stop paying my webhost to park it for me.

Having let more unread posts pile up like a massive pile of unread posts, I've decided once and for all to declare Google Reader bankruptcy. George Bush, I Can Haz Bailout?

As stipulated in the bankruptcy agreement with the Court of Google, I have clicked the Mark All As Read link and deleted all the feeds I've subscribed to, on the proviso I lead a more sustainable lifestyle from now on and only subscribe to enough feeds that I can afford [with my time].

And because it's easier to write about something instead of actually doing something, behold a post discussing my new Google Reader strategy in all its strategic gloryness. I'm pretty sure that isn't a word.

Where's my jetpack?

Back when I first started using blog readers in the day with Bloglines, it was assumed in the tech community that aggregators would somehow become intelligent over time and relieve us of information overload. In that context it made sense to subscribe to as much stuff that interested us as possible so the super smart software intelligence smarts would be able to paint a more accurate picture of our tastes and preferences, and help us in our quest for enlightenment.

Of course, this never happened, and here we are in 2010 with trillions of web pages and billions of web feeds (probably). Alas the burden is still on us to select feeds we think are useful and be selective about what we subscribe to, because if we subscribe to everything that looks interesting, we end up reading less, if that makes sense. It's like an inverse relationship thing.

Henceforth, Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 will only have feeds I've vetted and am confident I'll read often. Each feed might be free in terms of moulah, but they all have an opportunity cost.

Google Reader isn't for realtime news anymore

With the advent of Twitter and near-realtime news, I've decided to ditch news outlet feeds from Google Reader entirely. Combined they added up to hundreds of new posts to read each hour which would be added to my dismayingly large "All Items (unread)" number with alarming speed. Besides, I would have already seen the news they reported in TweetDeck hours before.

Henceforth, Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 will only be for analysis and fully fleshed out posts, not just headlines.

Only a summary? Cheerio!

This is one of the arguments that's as old as RSS: should whole posts or only summaries be included in feeds? As a blogger myself I can understand the attraction with only including a summary in a feed so people come to your site (which means they're more likely to click other things and leave comments), but as a blog reader it frustrates me when all I get is a truncated version of a post.

Henceforth, so I don't have to leave the Google Reader environment, in Ruben Schade's Google Reader 2.0 I will not be subscribing to blogs that only post summaries.

No moreth of Ye Blog Networks

I've lamented the appearance of huge blogs with lots of writers several times here before; suffice to say with them around there are fewer individual voices with their own ideas and insight and more homogenised material churned out that's largely indistinguishable from other homogenised material.

There are still some insanely interesting people who are allowed a certain degree of individual freedom on blog networks (Om Malik's GigaOm for example) but henceforth if I can find an independent writer who's passionate about a topic, I'll choose them over a network writer. Personally maintained and written blogs by interesting people are so much fun to read.

Can I pull it off?

Or perhaps a more pertinent question: will all of these "henceforths" make any difference? Probably not!

By the way, http://rubenerd.com/feed/. Cheers :)

Update!

I started off with good intentions, but for the most part I ended up subscribing to virtually everything I had before. I suppose I'll just have to get used to clicking that big ol' "Mark All As Read" button more often!

In case you're still subscribed to my blog through the old address (pictured above) but don't follow my shared items in The Google Readers I'm passing this message I posted along with my sincerest apologies!

Sorry for the flurry of blog posts everyone! I had a DNS problem so if you're subscribed to my blog through the old URL still, you probably just got whacked with two dozen new posts. Forgive me, I'll try not to let it happen again!

While I have the RSS feed from my old side redirecting, if you're still subscribed through the old address I encourage you to move over to the new one, if only because it seems Google Reader updates it more often and is more reliable. Thanks :).

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it's another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can't imagine. </cheesyness>

I'll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

Time for some shameless self promotion! I've started a new website for a pet project of mine that isn't a website at all, it's just an RSS feed. Technically I could have published all the stuff here on my blog, but I thought I'd give this a try.

http://rubenerd.com/puzzles.xml

Some people start blogs about their obsession with cupcakes, so I've decided to create one to keep track of the pretty sudoku puzzles I try to do on a regular basis. I figure my blog already has enough stuff on it, and I don't want to fill up my Flickr account which already has enough things that aren't photos!

To keep things simple, this page is just an RSS feed I craft myself. Most modern browsers will generate a pretty page when they encounter a web feed, which means I don't have to worry about CMSs, HTML, themes, maintenance, blasted PHP! You can even subscribe to it if you really care.

Peace, health and happiness ^_^
~ Ruben (@Rubenerd)

Here's an idea for a Google Reader feature that in my opinion is long overdue. If Reader attempts to fetch a web feed and it encounters a 301 permanent redirect to a legitimate new address it should update its own records in user accounts to point to the new address instead of still pinging the old one.

I ask for my own selfish reasons because as of now more people are still subscribed to my blog here through the old http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ address instead of http://rubenerd.com/feed/. Each request to the old URI takes more effort and bandwidth than the new one, and I've noticed items that appear in the new one instantly can sometimes take an hour or longer to appear in the old one. An automatic update would fix this.

Good idea?

As I've eluded to previously I gave up on Firefox 3.5.x on my MacBook Pro OS X and FreeBSD partitions because it was far too unstable to use without going bat crazy insane. I left Windows for a reason!

For some reason though going back to 3.0.x has caused Google Reader to generate a few errors a day after not having any trouble at all. It could very well be a problem with our home internet connection here not Firefox but it is a weird coincidence.

If it weren't for the fact all my friends from Twitter, Whole Wheat Radio and the real world used it I'd probably go back to Bloglines full time. In fact at one point I was going to research whether I could subscribe to people's Google shared items and comments in Bloglines and have people subscribe to my Bloglines shared items and comments from Google Reader. Might be worth looking into again.

I've figured out why some iTunes users have been reporting problems with subscribing to the Rubenerd Show through the iTunes Store. I deleted my own subscription, searched for "Rubenerd Show" in the iTunes Store and resubscribed to only be given a small circle and an exclamation point.

When I right clicked and chose "Show Description" I was given the above dialog box. No wonder it isn't working, it's trying to access new shows from http:///show/feed/ for some reason!

I don't know how or why this happened. I'll be contacting Apple about this to see if I can get it pointing back to the proper URI again. I believe my good friend Felix Tanjono submitted my podcast to the iTunes Store back in 2005 back when Australia and Singapore didn't have access to it.

While I'm sorting this out you can still go to iTunes, choose the Advanced menu and click Subscribe to Podcast, then enter the following address as a stopgap:

http://rubenerd.com/show/feed/

Sorry about this, I don't know how this could have happened :-(.

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don't care why this happened, but I'm so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don't have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I'm putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won't be ready for a few days. Another post I'm positive you're all anxiously awaiting ;-).