That trip I took last week really took me out of my regular development rhythm. So today I made a small beta release of WebnoteHappy. Only a few things changed, but I think its important to get in a rhythm and stay in it. Even if it is only a small change, its good to make it and deliver it to your beta testers. In this way, you keep adding small improvements continuously (kaizen) until you get to your 1.0 or whatever your next release is.
I think the same goes for blog entries. No need to wait until you’ve got the next del.icio.us/popular worthy post. Just write what you’ve got. I think blog readers appreciate a certain rhythm.
Related to that, I got a handle on my NetNewsWire feeds by using the Dinosaurs window. I read via Tim Bray that the brown feeds in the NNW 2.1 beta are dinosaurs. (Also known as Merlin Mann Coloring. How cool is it to get a feature named after you? Yes, I’m talking to you Mike Harris.) So I deleted everything that was over 90 days old and wasn’t just a broken/redirected feed. I’m now down to 329 feeds from a high of 400 feeds.
I enjoy the dinosaurs feature to occasionally weed out completely dead subscriptions, but I don’t really feel that it’s a productivity boost since it doesn’t reduce my reading load. You said you went to 329 feeds from 400, but if they were mostly or all dinosaurs, they weren’t costing you anything in “New Unreads.” It’s like having friends who never email you, they just don’t add to your inbox count.
So what will probably be more interesting in the long run is the new “Sort by Attention” feature, which may ultimately show that the 20-article per day feeds I subscribe to and skim through without hardly reading, really should be unsubscribed :)
“20-article per day feeds I subscribe to and skim through without hardly reading”
*cough* slashdot! *cough*
What I do for feed management is employ a system kind of like the one described here (does html work in comments? we will find out). I have a “Halfway House” folder, a “Probation” folder, and a “Sequester” folder. New feeds always start in “Probation”, and then get promoted or demoted depending on how much I’m enjoying them. Likewise, if a feed starts annoying me regularly, I can drop it in the halfway house so that I know I need to “keep an eye” on it.
Hi to you too. :)