Bitsenbloc

Since now I’m using three computers, I’m moving my digital life to on-line services (webware).

Google Docs is being very useful in this regard, but I think it lacks some important features:

1. The possibility to share folders, and all their contents with other people.
2. Better permission management
3. The possibility to import PDF files, not to edit them, but to store, index and search them.
4. Integration with Picasa web albums: albums should be folders in Google Docs, so we could search all our stuff from the same interface.
5. …

Google Reader (GR) has been my feed reader of choice for a long time. Probably it is the best feed reader out there.

Nevertheless there is a problem with GR. As almost every other feed reader, it uses the e-mail paradigm applied to feeds. Each post is an item and appears chronologically ordered in its folder. This paradigm works well with e-mail because we are supposed, at least, to read every single message. But for feeds, the paradigm is quite stressful. To store every single unread post is like having a pile of old unread newspapers asking you to go through all of them. What a stress! It is true that GR has a “mark all read” button, but using it is sort of a failure.

The solution is to use a non exhaustive system, this is, a system that tells you there is new stuff to be read, but it doesn’t count it nor supposes you are going to read everything. An easy way to build such a system is to use Feevy, a dynamic blogroll system for your blog.

Once it is set up, Feevy shows in your blog (or wherever you want), and in chronological order, the last post of each subscribed blog. This way, you know where and when there is new stuff, but you only read it if you can. Its like having the day’s front page of your personal blogsphere. In case you want to browse the archives of a blog, you can do this at the blog’s site. There is no need to build a parallel archive.

After reading this, it might be difficult to understand the point, but I encourage you to try Feevy for a while. I’m sure that some of you, the ones that like keeping stuff simple, will enjoy it. It will help you to get things done with no pain.

You can check my Feevy at the bottom of this blog.

I’d like to thank David, the mind behind Feevy, for showing me this trick.

Finally, I’ll add some items to my Feevy Wishlist:

1. A Google Gadget for Feevy (What about a Facebook app.?)
2. To be able to see my Feevy at Feevy’s site, this way, all those that do not have a blog, could use Feevy as a feed reader. A side effect, would be that these pages could show some ads and create some extra revenue.

Update: I have corrected a little bit the English of the article. Don’t forget that this is not my mother tongue and that I don’t live in an English speaking country.

Feevy is a tool made to create dynamic blogrolls. These are much better than the usual static ones, because they give a real-time picture of your network. Furthermore, feevy can be used as a zen-feed-reader, because, as it shows only the last post of each blog, it doesn’t stress you with an indicator that says, for example, “164 unread posts”.

• Import and export (OPML)
• Plain theme (without pictures)
• Automatic creation of a Google CSE that searches in the subscribed blogs [1]. At the end of the feevy badge, there would be a “search these blogs” form.
• Update: Integration with firefox: It would be great to have feevy in Firefox’s subscribe-to-feed menu.

Update: Today I’ve writen a new post about Feevy.

[1] That should not be difficult. I think that it is enough to create a html document with the links to the feed or the root address of the blogs .

Notebook should be able to hold many kinds of data, not only web sites. So, I’d like to be able to

1. Send SMS messages with my mobile phone to my notebook (this way I would not need a paper notebook)
2. Send e-mail to my notebooks, to keep data on a project together.

Update:

As I use Google Notebook to make lists, it would be interesting to know the number of items in a notebook.

Thanks for signing up with Pownce. You can now send all sorts of stuff to your friends on Pownce including messages, files, event invitations, pictures, and links!

The problem is that my friends don’t use Pownce! So, as twitter, it is useless to me.

You have to understand the selfish user. User #1 has to find the system useful or you won’t get user #2. Systems that only become useful when lots of people are using them usually fail, because there’s no incentive for people to contribute themselves.

Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is usefull to me even if my friends don’t use it.

Read more about this interesting subject, in spanish, here.

Update: The fact that one can post to everybody and/or friends, allows me to use Pownce as a microblogging tool. With twitter there is a problem, wether you go public, wether you go private, with pownce you can do both. That’s good.

In one of his posts, Tsuguya Sasaki writes:

I don’t trust the computer literacy of anyone who neither has his or her favorite text editor nor knows how to use it with a keyboard and keyboard shortcuts

When using computers, basically we deal with text. This is why the keyboard remains the most important data entry system of our computers.

And to do all this, it is more efficient to use a fully featured editor, like vim (it is my choice), emacs, texmaker or [put your preferred fully featured editor here] than the poor editors of, for example, our webrowsers or mailers.

The problem is that most applications implement their own editor. Why should I write e-mails in Thunderbird‘s poorly featured editor if I could use vim? Thunderbird was made to manage e-mail, vim to write text, why should Thunderbird want to do vim’s job?

Fortunatelly there is an extension, that works on almost every mozilla application (Firefox, Thunderbird,…), which allows us to edit the text of any form with any editor in a transparent and practical manner. It is called, ViewSourceWith.

So, now, I can write all my e-mails (from Gmail) with vim, and I write the posts of this blog, also with vim. I only have to press CTRL-SHIFT-U and the editor appears! It’s almost magic. It’s clean. It makes me more productive! And, last but not least, it continues the good Unix tradition of integrating applications that do one job very well.

Give it a try!