Information Overload

Lately, I’ve been getting really tired of opening up the old NetNewsWire and finding over 300 items that I needed to get through. I know I’m not the only person out there feeling the pressure of information overload, but it’s just getting to the point where I don’t think it’s possible to keep up with it all. I love keeping up with all of the news on the interwebernet, but man…

Paul got me thinking about this with a post he made noting the move of his nearly all of his bookmarks to his RSS reader:

No longer do I need to maintain 300 miscellaneous bookmarks that clutter my browser. I can throw those really random ones to del.icio.us, keep the daily-reads and private bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar and direct the rest to an aggregator. Feeds have really changed the way that I browse in the past year that I have passionately been using RSS wherever it is to be found.

What I found works best for me is going the other way.

Instead of adding more to my RSS reader, I took out the major offenders like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit and moved them into my browser bookmarks bar. (side note: I got rid of Slashdot all together.) I think that reading sites made up of links is more natural than scrolling through RSS items – and I’ve found it to be much quicker. The real benefit, though, is that there’s less clutter obscuring the sites I read with less volume.

Another thing I decided to do was to stop saving feed items. Why save feed items for longer than they’re in the feed? That’s against the whole point of feeds: feeds are supposed to be fresh.

Finally, and more generally, I’m doing my best to Fight the Urge to Read Everything in Front of Me. I’m also trying not to to catalogue, store, share, or archive everything I come across. There will always be a way to find that link again… If it was important anyway… If not, I figure it’s better to just toss it and consider your life “simplified”.

Alex King Leaves FeedLounge

One of the two creators of the ambitious FeedLounge web-based RSS reader has left the team. You can read the announcement (or here), which makes it sound as though there was some internal tension or something on how best to move the project forward.

Ultimately, the choice for me to leave was very hard, but one I felt had to be made. Despite hard work and the best of intentions, the level of service we were providing to our FeedLounge customers was just not something I was comfortable putting my name behind.

Utimately, however, the problem with Feedlounge is something I pointed out just about a year ago. The site is just too slow.

I’m sorry to report that I’m giving up on FeedLounge (at least for now). Things are just moving too slow for me, and I’m heading back to NetNewsWire.

I love the idea of an RSS reading web app, but after using FeedLounge exclusively for a while, I opened up NNW and realized that I had to move back to a client side app.

Really, I can just get through my feeds faster that way. Plus, there is the ability to refresh feeds on demand. Also, the pricing seems like it’ll be more than the 24.95 flat charge on NNW, which is understandable, but also… well… more!

I’ll try FeedLounge again once you guys get the extra equipment that’s supposed to make things faster, but I just wanted to give you an honest opinion of the service up to this point.

Thanks again!

Quite a shame, because there is a lot of great stuff in FeedLounge, and Alex seems like a great developer. Maybe Scott will be able to turn things around, but I’m not too sure this is a good sign.

Internet Soul Portraits

There’s an interesting gallery of well known webpages that have been stripped of their goodies. The collection includes such favorites as Yahoo (above), eBay, CNN, and Google. Visit site »

explodingdog

If you haven’t seen explodingdog yet, you’re really missing out.

Visit the site »

Centering a Page with CSS

There’s a very simple way to center a web-page horizontally, using only a smidgen of CSS:

body {
margin: 0px auto;
width: 760px;
}

Blogger Going Dynamic

Blogger switches to a dynamic platform after years of serving static html. I know not many people will appreciate it, but this is really interesting news. I’m pretty amazed at the transition, but I’m also kind of wondering about how long it took.

…You see, static serving was at one time a feature, in fact, the enabling feature of Blogger, because it allowed Blogger to publish via FTP—i.e., you could serve your blog off an entirely different host than Blogger was running on (like evhead.com, for instance), and it worked with virtually any web publishing system. It also allowed us to serve a tremendous number of web sites off very little hardware.

The limitations to static publishing, though, are significant and are the reason that Blogger hasn’t had these types of features (and many more) in the past.

Converting the entire operation to a dynamic model meant essentially replacing the entire architecture, which is likely serving tens of millions of pages a day. This was a daunting task. But the team got it done (messy transition process still to come). And now much, much more is possible.

Was it really that big of a change to move over?

I mean, WordPress can move the other way, and that seemed to happen relatively quick. Moveable Type did it as well, I believe, but neither of those have been centrally hosted in the past.

I wonder, too, if WordPress might start to stagnate being centrally hosted. I don’t know why that would be the case, but my fear is that centralized hosting might undermine your ability to innovate. Although, I can see how supporting thousands of distributed installation would be somewhat daunting. Plus, I’ve seen a lot of activity in the WordPress community that seams to have been enlivened by the recent funding that Automattic recieved.

I’m just looking for a reason why the Blogger upgrade was so difficult, although maybe it was just that they only recently made the decision to move.

k2 lite for Sandbox

I’m very pleased to announce the immediate availability of k2 lite for Sandbox. This is a port of the fabulous k2 for the wonderful Sandbox.

Porting a WordPress theme into a WordPress theme…? Sounds crazy at first, but it’s a pretty exciting proposition once you start to grok it. I believe that the good people working on k2 have already done so, and might even be working on a k2 for Sandbox as well.

The original k2 theme is more than your average theme – it’s more of a WordPress extension if anything. It comes pre-packaged with support for a ton of useful plugins, and it does all kinds of cool stuff right out of the box:

K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress… K2 is the followup to Kubrick, created by the same author… But more than that. K2 for instance also has an options panel, from which you can select custom styles, upload header images, configure the sidebar to infinitesimal levels, turn our AJAX features on and off and much more.

The thing about k2 is that it does so much, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it’s so very simple get an advanced WordPress blog up and running. It’s a curse because the theme is so very huge. That means that customization can be difficult and complicated, especially for beginners.

My goal in making k2 lite was to make a version of k2 without any of those advanced features – a version of k2 that maintains the look and feel without suffering from the overhead. To put it into perspective, I was able to trim down the 1153 lines of CSS in the fully loaded k2 theme to 349 lines for k2 lite.

The Sandbox theme is, also, more than your average theme – it’s more of a WordPress platform, I’d say. The idea behind Sandbox is summarized here:

Sandbox is a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned, so beginners will feel comfortable styling it since they only need to know CSS. More experienced themers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.

So, the idea here is to port k2 into a skin for Sandbox. In the end, I think it’s a bit more than that, though – it’s a lite version of k2!

Sandbox has already garnered the support of WordPress.com, and is the recommended for use in their first paid upgrade option, Custom CSS. That means the good folks over at WordPress.com can start using k2 lite on their blogs right away.

Enough rambling…

Click here to download the theme »

Update 1: Brian released a port of k2 called k2lite in July.

Update 2: I’ve fixed the CSS to work with the changes introduced in Sandbox 0.6.1.

Update 3: Small changes for the nav-above selector, fixes for ul/li items in post entries.