Tech and life

Google Reader Filter is an excellent tool for filtering out blog posts with keywords that aren’t of any interest to you in your RSS feeds. But if you use the utility CCleaner for your PC maintenance to delete temporary internet files, history and cookies etc., perhaps you’ve noticed that it also strips out all your carefully entered keyword excludes and highlights from Google Reader Filter.

I used to get around this by copying and pasting my keyword excludes and highlights into a text file so I could always paste these back into the filter later. After all, it takes time to build up a good comprehensive list of filter keywords and it’s annoying when you lose them. But this is also a little time consuming to have to repeat this each time you run CCleaner.

So I had a look at the settings in CCleaner to see if there was a way to preserve the Google Reader Filter settings. After a bit of trial and error, I came across the answer. If you open CCleaner and go to Options and choose Cookies:

In the left column, you’ll see a list of cookies which will be deleted next time you run Cleaner. To prevent Google Reader Filter settings from being removed just move all the google cookies (in my case, google.co.uk, google.com, www.google.com) to the right hand Cookies to Keep column as shown above.

Now, when you run Cleaner (the top option in the image above), then reopen Chrome or Firefox, all your Google Reader Filter settings should still be present.

On a side note, in CCleaner, you can also save any other important cookies you want to keep, for example to prevent deletion of specific site log in details after you run CCleaner.

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.

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.