Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I have setup Feedburner so that it is m primary RSS feed. Up until now the WordPress default feed was in use and it was impossible to get statistics.

I would love it if the people who subscribe via RSS could re-add me to their readers by clicking on the button on the top of the page. Even if you already used that button, it now points to the correct location.

Thanks a bunch everyone!

There are a ton of ways to access Twitter these days and many of the solutions offer advanced ways of organizing the tweets in a logical way. I have been a fan of TweetDeck for quite a while but I always found it a pain to set it up on each computer I use. I have an office PC, a laptop, a home desktop and sometimes I work on my wife’s laptop if it is the handier of the computers in the house. Having to install Adobe Air, then TweetDeck  and then configure TweetDeck like I am used to using it can be a real pain. Then there are other times when I have to re-do it because like a lot of techies, I format and reinstall quite often.

Most recently, while Tweeting about I heard of an alpha release of PeopleBrowsr.com. This is a website that is quite similar to TweetDeck in layout and features, but like most websites I don’t have to worry about configuration when I move to another computer. I think it comes down to the same reason that I use Google’s hosted e-mail; no matter where I am, I always have access to it and the configuration remains the same.

Knowing how to get somewhere and do something in a software that is meant to increase efficiency is the key to its success. The only reason that TweetDeck worked for me is because I invested the time in setting it up exactly the same on every computer I use. If not for that, TweetDeck wouldn’t have been as effective.

On the other side of the coin, if I were a person who was always on the same computer then I wouldn’t have made the switch. Other than the accessibility of the product, I don’t use many of the extra features. I am able to connect to other services such as FriendFeed but I actually prefer to login to the FriendFeed website and use their interface. The same reasons why PeopleBrowsr.com is a great access point for Twitter don’t apply to FriendFeed.

So a heads up for those of you who find yourself at more than one computer in a day. To be able to instantly jump into the Twitterverse as soon as you sit down, even for the first time at any computer is an awesome thing.

Note that this is still an alpha version and is prone to bugs. I haven’t found anything that is stopping me from using it in the last week. It is also only compatible with Firefox and Safari at this point.

Let’s face it! Google Reader was a pretty slick interface before they went and made any changes this week. I wasn’t expecting it (probably was mentioned on the reader blog RSS feed) but it is a welcome update.

I am a huge fan of clean looking interfaces. I supposed that is why I like OS X and some of the simpler applications out there. They have taken away some of the colouring that they had on the left side and replaced it with white backgrounds. The sections are separated with lines rather than a background colour difference which looks much nicer. My biggest pet peeve of the old version was the green background under the ‘add subscription’ button and now it’s gone.

Before:

After:

I have been using Google Reader for quite some time as my RSS reader. It’s a great way to read RSS feeds and I like the fact I can log in from anywhere with internets access to take a peak if I have time. It’s nice to know that Google is keeping an eye on their existing products and trying to find ways at making them better.

Some of the other cool features include the ability to collapse sections on the left side, the ability to turn off unread counts, updated friend sharing tools and they have added more bundles to their list.

I must say that I am happy with the graphical update and look forward to making use of the new features. If you don’t use Google Reader and are looking for a good web based RSS reader, give it a chance. You won’t be disappointed.

I have had RSS setup for sometime with the default WordPress settings. It worked great except that there are little options. People have been subscribed but I have no way of telling how many. Either I wasn’t looking in the right places or the feature built in just doesn’t carry the information. So many people read blogs by subscribing to their feeds, never to return to the original site. Heck, I do it too.

So I have turned to Feedburner. Another RSS feeder that allows the publisher to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and also has a great interface for the subscriber.

If you subscribed before now to my RSS feed, I would ask that you cancel and re-subscribe with Feedburner if it’s not too much trouble. If the only option is cancel the old and not re-subscribe I would prefer you keep reading, however I would love to track who’s out there.

Simply click over on one of these icons on the right!

If your service isn’t listed there, click on either the orange RSS icon or the feed counter.

To enable the features on the right site I installed a Feedburner widget that I like the look of. There are a couple out there but some of them have integration problems with my theme so I chose this one.

Then I added the counter which you can get from the Feedburner website. They have a code generator that I took and added into a “text” widget in WordPress. And voila, I think a nice addition!