Tech and life

I love getting comments on blog posts and I’ve already blogged my arguments for keeping posts open for comments. Thankfully, most posts I make receive mostly positive comments and I haven’t had to deal with too much negative stuff. Obviously I listen to the negatives and try and improve if I’m at fault. But I think we can all learn something from negative comments on tech advice blogs – and that includes the commenter, the audience and myself. Here’s two general examples based on comments I received recently.

Your tech tip didn’t work for me

This particular post had about 10-15 positive comments. People really liked the tech tip I gave and it worked for them all. Then one person left a comment just saying that it didn’t work for them. Fair enough. But it would have been nice if the commenter had given a bit more info on what he had tried before leaving the negative comment. If the tip worked for me and the first 10 commenters then perhaps the problem may not be the tech tip but a conflict in that person’s system causing it to fail to work. If they had access to another computer, they could try running it on that for example. The main thing is just try your best to figure out why it doesn’t work for you and eliminate your set-up before leaving a negative comment then we can all learn if there are particular set-ups where the tip won’t work.

Criticise, but at least offer an alternative

In another post, I reviewed some free software which I thought was pretty good. Again a number of commenters liked it. Then one person accurately pointed out some failings in the software and said he was disappointed. Again fair enough, but it would have been nice if, instead of being completely negative, the commenter had recommended a free better alternative or one that they used themselves so again we would have learned something. But there was nothing.

So if you leave negative comments on tech tips blogs, help us all to learn from your comment and take something positive from it.

Any comment on blog comments? Drop a comment below.

After several years of reading RSS blog feeds, you get a feel for the authors whose posts you most look forward to reading and who rarely disappoint. I’ve picked out 5 tech bloggers who you might want to follow. I could easily have picked out 10 more but I’ll leave that for another day.

David Pierce

David writes at his blog Digitizd and covers topics from web tools and organization to writing. He aims to help you make the most of technology but yet is never too technical, always thought provoking and always a good read.

Matthew Guay

Trying to make tech simpler, Matthew blogs at Techinch but can also be found at Web.AppStorm, How-To Geek and Digital Inspiration, all excellent tech blogs. Covering mainly web apps and software, like David, he’s never too technical and always willing to help out with questions in the blog comments.

Lee Mathews

One of my favourite bloggers, Lee has put me in touch with many really useful web apps and software over the years. If Lee blogs about it, it’s generally worth trying. He got me started with LastPass some years ago and Chrome more recently. Lee used to blog at DownloadSquad but unfortunately, this site folded earlier this week much to my great dismay. In the meantime, you can follow him on Twitter. I’m sure it won’t be long before he’s actively blogging again and when he does I’ll update this post.

Rich Menga

Rich blogs at PC Mech and covers PC hardware, software and the internet. I find his posts on PC hardware, routers, networking, etc particularly useful and well written. He clearly know his stuff.

JL Beeken

JL blogs at JLog with the strapline ‘Simple computer technology for genealogists’ – but don’t let this put you off. I’m not interested in genealogy but find many of his posts incredibly useful and insightful. JL covers photo management and tagging, file organization, and backup among other things. Here’s a great recent post A Simple Backup Plan explaining file backup using the free utility Syncback.

So if you’ve enjoyed reading posts on my blog, I encourage you to look at these five tech bloggers – you’ll probably like them too. And of course if you really enjoy reading a particular blogger, I’d love to know in the comments.

Image credit: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you use either of these services and you follow the latest tech news, chances are you’ll know that both have been in the news recently. Xmarks was to close down but found a buyer in LastPass. More recently, Delicious has been the subject of feverish rumours that its owners Yahoo! were to shut it down. In the event, it looks like Yahoo! will try to find a buyer for it.

The blogosphere will pounce on rumours and ‘bad news’

Unfortunately, much as the old print media used to do, many tech news bloggers pounce on early rumours or perceived ‘bad news’ and blog about it despite the fact that it’s just a rumour and everyone else is doing the same thing. I follow quite a few tech blogs and the amount of posts on both stories was quite staggering, all trying to present the early rumours, how to export your data from the ‘sinking ship’ and any viable alternatives to the services.

The future is bright

There’s no question that the internet is still in its infancy. Services will come, go or be bought up in the inevitable shake-down that will see the cream rise to the top. Despite the initial ‘bad news’ of a possible shut down, any really great service with a poor or non-existent business plan, like Xmarks, will surely be snapped up and continue in some form. Other services like Delicious which haven’t progressed much in years in terms of new functionality and innovation, face the very real prospect of being overtaken by newish kids on the block like Diigo which notably allows you to cache bookmarked pages making them searchable in your bookmark archive. So don’t panic. If it’s a good service, it will probably be bought up or be replaced by a better one. The site AlternativeTo lists software and applications you might want to replace and gives great alternatives, based on user recommendations. It lists a number of excellent alternatives to Delicious including Diigo.

What can we learn

1. If you do keep up with the latest tech news with a blog RSS reader, don’t let the blogosphere ‘freak you out’ when shut-downs are rumoured. If you use Google Reader, try using Google Reader Filter to filter out the flurry of activity when these rumours or ‘bad news’ stories arise. Do this by adding terms like Xmarks or Delicious to your Excludes list. Then switch the filter off after a week or two to see what’s actually going to happen after all the rumours have died down. If you don’t follow tech news closely, you may just miss all this and wonder what all the fuss has been about. Indeed, tech news does seem to have a very short shelf life.

2. If it’s a great service used widely, chances are it will be bought up and continue in some form, possibly freemium,  so don’t panic.

3. The internet is still in the great shake-down. Many services are starting up to rival more established services and offering more bells and whistles. There are alternatives out there, or one will quickly emerge to fill the gap. For example, there are plenty of tech posts out now listing Delicious alternatives and how to export your bookmarks.

4. Make sure you can export your data from any service you rely heavily on and would miss if it were to fold so that if the inevitable does happen, you can quickly move over to a new service.

Any thoughts on this? Drop a comment below.

It doesn’t matter whether your article title is being seen on an RSS reader, on Twitter, Facebook or Delicious,  those few words in your headline are vitally important. They’re the difference between attracting a potential reader to click and find out more or pass over to another article. So you have to get it right first time.

I work in list view in Google Reader so when I’m browsing new posts, all I see is the article title and perhaps part of the first sentence so I know how important the first impression of the title is. Here’s some points to consider when composing your title.
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I’m currently following about 330 blogs in Google Reader and learn an awesome amount from reading great posts there.  I’m mostly interested in blog posts about new online applications and services, tech how-tos and tutorials, PC troubleshooting, Windows and Linux tips and tricks, learning Linux, learning WordPress, SEO, web design, and social networking. I star and tag the best posts that I find really useful and that I may want to refer to again.
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Since I signed up with Twitter about two years ago, I’ve been using it mostly to share the best tech links I’ve come across during the day, and I also see some of the tech news stories tweeted by people I’m following. But Twitter isn’t my number 1 source for finding news stories – no, it’s still Google Reader. And for me, Twitter may not be the best place to share links any more as we’ll see below.
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It’s common knowledge in SEO circles that not posting frequently and regularly will decrease your blog page rank and probably lead to a drop in RSS feed subscribers. What I don’t accept is the advice I’ve occasionally read on some blogs that if you’re suffering from feed overload and looking to prune back your RSS subscriptions, you should unsubscribe from blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly.

As I see it, the most important consideration in unsubscribing should be content. If a blog is offering interesting fresh content, even if on an irregular basis, I would keep my subscription. Having said that, if the blog is clearly stagnating with no posts for the previous 3 or 4 months, I might just drop it, unless the blogger has posted good reasons for taking a break.

Lighten the load

When you think about it, cutting back on blogs which update only occasionally isn’t going to have much effect on your blog overload. What you should be aiming to do is cut the blogs whose content isn’t interesting to you anymore, or the blogs which are pushing out poor content just to achieve a daily post target. In addition, in the tech space there are quite a few blogs which just reblog tech news and press releases. You don’t need this duplication so cut out a few of these. All these are the culprits in overloading your blog feed.

Spare a thought for the blogger

If you’re blogging in your spare time and aren’t a full-time blogger, it certainly isn’t easy to push out good fresh content on a daily basis. I blog in my spare time and put out posts when I can. And good unique blog ideas don’t come daily. In addition, the research which goes into make a good post may take a couple of days in your spare time. I only manage to post at most 3 times a week, but it can be as little as once a fortnight. So far I haven’t put adverts on my blog so I get no monetary reward for blogging. I do it for the enjoyment. So don’t penalize the part-time or occasional blogger who hasn’t taken the step to full-time blogging or perhaps just doesn’t want to.

And if you are a full-time blogger, take a few days off now and again to recharge. You’ll almost certainly return with fresher content and have developed a few ideas in the meantime.

Content is king

This should be the main focus on whether to unsubscribe from a blog feed. If a blogger is pushing out good fresh content which is of interest to you, keep subscribing even if they do post on an irregular basis. And if you do like a post, try and thank them in the blog comments or share their post in your social network. It may be the only reward they get for their efforts.

Update (11th September 2010): Here’s an interesting blog post backing up the premise that less is more and that it’s quality that counts: Why posting less can improve your blog

The case for continuing to subscribe to blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you follow as many tech blogs as I do in your RSS reader (currently about 160 tech blogs in my Tech folder), a good number will probably be tech news blogs. When a big tech story breaks, the news can get blogged to death as each site puts up their own post rather than linking to or just tweeting someone else’s story. Understandable really, they all want to meet their daily quota of posts to maintain page visits and pagerank, and don’t want to miss out on big tech news stories.

Tech and Life isn’t a tech news blog. We concentrate more on blogging about useful web apps and services, and tips and tricks for Windows, Linux and WordPress. If I do come across some interesting tech news, I’ll generally tweet a good link, rather than adding yet another post to the blogosphere. Follow us on Twitter at @techandlife. I try and tweet the best 5 or 6 tech links I see each day.

I’ve noticed that Microsoft stories are particularly prone to reblogging. I’m thinking of Windows 7 ‘God Mode’ a few months back – everyone seemed to carry that story. More recently, it’s been Microsoft Fix It Center and just a couple of days ago, the Microsoft/FaceBook Docs.com story. Here’s the 16 posts on Microsoft Fix It Center gathered together in my Google Reader feed

This reblogging can really clog up your feed reader so here’s what you could do. Read the story on one of the bigger blogs like Download Squad, ghacks or Lifehacker, bookmark it if you like, then set up a filter in Google Reader to suppress that story from your feed in future. I’ve blogged about the awesome Google Reader Filter before and using it to filter out stories you just don’t want to appear in your RSS feed. After about a week, the surge over that particular item of tech news will have subsided and you can remove the keyword from your filter.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in following some good tech blogs in your RSS reader, there’s a few good ones there to get you started.

Quick tip: Filter out tech news stories being reblogged to death is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

I spend well over an hour a day going through my 250 feed subscriptions in Google Reader. I always work in List View so I can skim through the post titles as quickly as possible. If the title of the post doesn’t look interesting to me, I move right along. Anything that would speed up working through the feeds would improve my productivity. What I really needed was a way to filter out stuff so that I didn’t have to read uninteresting posts and at the same time that highlighted stuff of real interest.

Coincidentally, I found the answer I needed when browsing through though the posts in Google Reader, and it’s a real gem. Thanks to Arpit Kumar at Techie Buzz for blogging this great tip about filtering within Google Reader. Don’t worry, it’s real easy to install and set up so please try it out.

Google Reader Filter

Installation in Firefox is a two-stage process. First you have to install Greasemonkey then the feed filter. But first what’s Greasemonkey? Well it’s just a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. So first download and install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension from the Greasespot homepage. It will install just like any other Firefox addon, and you’ll probably have to restart your browser. Once it’s back open, you should see a Greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of the browser window. Now you can add Greasemonkey scripts. Hundreds have been written and are available here but today we’re going to install the Google Reader Filter script available here. Just click install on that page and then reload Google Reader.

You’ll see a new blue button called Filter settings at the top right of the Google Reader window as shown above. If you click on that you can add filter words to exclude or highlight posts in your list.

As you can see, if the post title has excluded words, the title will show as greyed out and if highlighted words are present, the title will be highlighted in green as shown above. If you check the box Hide excludes, you can drop the post completely if you like. Checking the box Prefer Highlights over excludes will highlight the post if it contains both highlighted and excluded words. Checking Hide duplicates does just what it says and any duplicate post titles in the list are excluded. The words in your filter list don’t appear to be case-sensitive. I did notice that if the word in the title is followed by a full point it won’t be excluded unless you add the word followed by a full point to the excluded list. If there’s a colon, dash or exclamation mark directly after the word in the title, it will be excluded or highlighted.

So now, in my case, I can filter out any feeds with the words iPad, Norton, etc., because I’m just not interested in these topics and my time can be more productively used reading other posts. At the same time, any topic I’m particularly interested in like Windows 7 will be highlighted and I can prioritise reading these posts if I want. Now, as I read post titles, when I spot further words I can add them to the filter.

I’ve set up the filter in Firefox on my Windows and Linux machines and they both work great. And yes I know, it’s yet another Firefox extension which is probably going to slow your browser even further. But if reading feeds in Google Reader is important for you then this is a must-have extension. And of course you can use Greasemonkey to run other scripts too. At the moment unfortunately, this filter doesn’t work in the Google Chrome browser.

All in all, a really simple way to filter your feeds within Google Reader and improve your productivity. I recommend you try it out and see what you think.

Having blogged for just over a year now, I never cease to be amazed at the time and effort some bloggers put in to produce tech posts which patiently detail a how-to or compile a list of great web apps, and on top of that, the blogger’s ability to post on a regular basis, very often in their spare time. I’d like to list a few of the best tech blogs I’ve found, not blogs passing on daily tech news, but those putting in a great effort to compile tech how-tos and walk-throughs or review and compare a number of web applications, clearly written and with great illustrations. These blogs are all great for the tech novice, and advanced users will find lots of interest in them too.

Hongkiat.com

Covering blogging, web design, photography, list posts, tips and how-tos all with a great layout. Well worth checking out. And with all of these blogs, be sure to check out their archives too.

Giggle Computer

I only came across this tech blog recently, I think through a link in a tweet, and I’m glad I did. Take a look through the archive and look at the range of stuff covered. Great walk-throughs and list posts.

WebAppStorm

Nice looking blog with list posts, round-ups, how-tos and reviews – and a sister site MacAppStorm.

Knowliz

Roundups, and how-tos covering Windows, Ubuntu, etc. I’ve bookmarked many posts on this site.

Technically Personal

Raju started this blog about the same time as I started mine and is clearly doing a great job. List posts, news, tips, tricks, and tweaks, how to watch online content for free, etc. And he posts at least once a day. Check it out!

Dedoimedo

A real gem here. Just look at the range of articles on the home page – Linux, Windows, web applications, games, physics. A lot of effort put into each post and a wealth of information to read. Bookmark this site.

Smashing Apps

List posts covering web design, web apps, tech, photography, and social media. Again a great back catalogue of posts to work through.

Tux Radar

Very good Linux blog for beginners and advanced users alike. Walk-throughs, reviews and round-ups. Published by Future Publishing, publishers of Linux Format magazine, for me the best Linux magazine.

MakeTechEasier

Covers tech cross-platform, and explains it in an uncomplicated fashion. Tech tips, reviews, walk-throughs and occasional list posts.

1stWebDesigner

Lots of list posts for bloggers, web designers and developers. Ten out of ten for effort!

So that’s just 10 of the top tech blogs I’ve come across and I’m sure there are other great examples out there. I haven’t included the big ones like Lifehacker, MakeUseOf and ghacks which I’m sure you already know of. If you have any you really like – particularly those dealing with web apps, tech how-tos, blogs that pack lots of useful info, drop a comment below.