Recently I privately declared RSS bankruptcy. I had managed to tame my feeds in such a way that I could usually get through everything and some days I’d just clear out my low value feeds in order to keep up. Then on June 30th as part of The Dojo I attended an online webinar “Escaping the Techno ADD Loop” and as part of it I asked the question how to keep up with RSS? Obviously I don’t want to miss out on anything important. Well, first after I explained my organization system they pointed out that I should probably just kill my low value folder. They also mentioned that if a website is important enough, you’ll check it on your own and if you don’t, maybe it isn’t that important.

It really hit home with me because I was getting tired of being the guy always on his phone “checkin’ my feeds” every single moment of my day. So I went in there with a big knife and now I only follow 8 feeds. And of those 8 feeds only three of them post daily. I can now check my RSS feeds once in the morning and be done with it. Maybe if I feel like it after lunch I’ll check it again but there will be like one or two posts. I’m not feeling very liberated not having the Google Reader noose hanging around my neck.

So I have been essentially without a feed reader for almost a month and a half now. Then on Monday I had lunch with my good friend Dan and he brought up FlipBoard which is sort of like a digital magazine that pulls it’s content from your social networks. I connect it to facebook and twitter and I get instant magazines. It doesn’t show everything, but somehow curates the content and lays it out in a very attractive layout. The facebook content is not particularly good, but I’m very impressed with the content it pulls out of twitter. In addition to my main twitter feed, it allows me to create magazines from specific twitter users or lists.

So far I think this is a good replacement to RSS feeds. If some piece of news is really important it will probably show up in one of these magazines. It’s also does not require me to dig through lists of noise as it just selects some of the best parts and makes it really easy to scan. I can check this once or twice a day and not feel like I have to clear out everything. Right now you’re still somewhat limited with how you create magazines. The twitter search is pretty limited and there is (as far as I can tell) no RSS integration. I can’t complain too much since it’s a free app.

When I was out in California I was somewhat involved with the group of people starting Hacker Dojo. I’ve been interested in creating a similar type of space in Madison. I started looking around at spaces when I was telecommuting for PBwiki but the issue is always how to fund it. It’s a chicken and egg type problem. Do you get members before you find a space or do you find a space then get members? Well I can’t afford to go out there and sign a lease for office space and then not have any members so the project died off.

Recently with the buzz around Diaspora I became aware of the site Kickstarter which is a cool tool to raise funds for projects. I started thinking maybe this could be used to seed a Madison coworking space?

I’m going to need to touch bases with some of the other members of the Madison tech community and see if they think this is a good idea. I’m thinking this is a strategy that might work. If enough people donate money to seed the space then one, we have money to start the space and two, we would have people probably interested in being members.

There is a group called Sector67 which seems to be trying to create more of a MakerSpace but I’m thinking about more of a coworking space that can also be used for meetups and smaller events like SuperHappyDevHouse or Ignite.

I read an article today on Silicon Alley Insider Amazon Tells Small Publishers It Will Stop Selling Their Books If They Join Apple which if that was the case would clearly be big news. However I read the quote and I’m left scratching my head. It actually doesn’t seem from what they print in the article that Amazon is actually threatening to de-list publishers to sell with Apple. I figure I should do a little more research and follow the links back to the original article from Melville House Publishing Hysterical Amazon exec calls 911, says accelerator is stuck and he can’t keep from running over publishers and it further solidifies my initial impression. Here’s how I’m paraphrasing the conversation between Amazon and the Publisher:

Publisher: Hey Amazon, we’re not happy with this “Wholesale Model” for selling ebooks on your website
Amazon: So? That’s how we do it.
Publisher: But Apple is letting us sell with the “Agency Model” which we’re much happier with, we want to sell through Amazon with the Agency Model too
Amazon: No, we’re not interested in doing that
Publisher: But you’re doing it with Hachette, Harper, Penguin and Simon & Schuster!
Amazon: Well, we’re in negotiations with them, nothing is final yet
Publisher: We want to negotiate too
Amazon: No, as matter of policy we are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore
Publisher: But we want to negotiate
Amazon: Tough shit
Publisher: Well, us little guys are going to band together and FORCE you to do it our way
Amazon: Go right ahead, we’re more then happy to remove you from our website, we’re not negotiating
Publisher: Oh yeah? Well you have cooties and I’m telling Mom

I’ve never been very good at managing my finances. There was a period of time back in college when I lived off my credit cards. Fortunately over the last few years I’ve gotten better at living within my means and have been gradually paying off my debt. Despite this I’m not exactly what you would describe as financially responsible. I just switched to using my debit card for things and I keep an eye on my available balance on my banks website. I’ve known for a while (and to the urging of my financial planner) that I really need to put together a budget and start saving money.

In the past I’ve tried Quicken and wasn’t too happy with it, I personally preferred Microsoft Money but even then I wasn’t happy with the way Money handled budgeting. Consequently I never really used either one and continued to live paycheck to paycheck. After getting an e-mail from Quicken the other day advertising a 50% off sale on Quicken Deluxe (normally $60) I decided it wouldn’t hurt for me to give it another shot.

Last night I bought my copy, got it syncing with my bank and credit cards and made sure transactions were categorized correctly. I have to say that Quicken has improved a lot since the last time I used it. Today I spent some time digging into it a little more, got my reoccurring bills set up and started to look into the “planning” section of the application.

The way the budgeting/planning section of Quicken 2010 works is once you have your reoccurring income and expenses in the system you can choose any number of categories to “watch” like dining, entertainment or groceries. When you watch a category you specify how much money you want to allocate to the category each month and as you spend money a little green bar moves across the screen showing how much of your allocation you’ve spent and how much is left. It also has a larger bar across the top of the screen that represents your expected income for the month and it breaks it down into three sections “Scheduled Bills”, “Categorized Spending” and “Left Over”. That way you can see right away how much money you actually have to spend as opposed to how much is in your bank account.

Then just now, I noticed a feature that made me so happy because it’s the feature I’ve been missing from these sorts of programs. Quicken calls it “Rollover Reserve” and basically that means that if you don’t spend your allocated amount that month, the remainder goes into the reserve so you can spend it in the future or reallocate it to other categories. This for me is a killer feature. If I allocate $200 to entertainment every month I should be able to hold back and not spend the full $200 for a few months in order to save up for bigger purchases like an Xbox 360.

If you’re looking to get on track financially in 2010 I’d highly recommend you check out Quicken 2010. So far this looks like something I’ll actually use, but truthfully only time will tell. If you want to get the discounted rate before January 4th just use the “Special Offer Code” 6296962157 at http://quicken.intuit.com/.

I previously talked about reordering my Google reader in order to make my life less overwhelming. A little over a month has gone by and I thought I’d post an update about how it’s worked.

Things have been a tremendous success. By simply re-categorizing my feeds into Low Volume, High Value and Low Value I have make my life so much more pleasant. Here’s how it works on a daily basis.

Low Volume: These are feeds that have less then 1 or 2 posts per day in them. Examples are Penelope Trunk’s Blog, Adventures in Capitalism and Modite. These are feeds that because they are low volume, how much value they produce for me is of little consequence.

High Value: These are feeds that have more then 1 or 2 posts a day but that I want to make sure to pay attention to. The only 4 feeds I have in this folder are TechCrunch, Mashable, Silicon Alley Insider and Brazen Careerist’s Featured Posts.

Low Value: These are fun feeds that are interesting, sometimes I get value from them, but honestly if I don’t get to them it’s not the end of the world. Examples are AfterEllen.com, JDub Records and Boing Boing. If I’m busy, I don’t bother with these and if they start piling up I just mark them all as read and get on with my life.

I also have a folder for my Google Alerts which I might glance at once in a while and a humor folder where I subscribe to a couple comic strips.

I’ve found that by organizing feeds on by volume and value I don’t feel overwhelmed that I’m missing something important anymore. With Google Reader on my iPhone I check my feeds whenever I have a little downtime and now I know exactly what I should be checking.

I’m someone that likes to think of himself as pretty driven and goal oriented. I think this is why it’s bothered me so much that lately I’ve been floundering without any great direction. Some of it is probably the “Quarterlife Crisis” but it could also be that I’ve been getting lazy.

I firmly believe in having various goals set for various timelines and at one time I kept a wiki page that listed my goals for the next month, three months, six months and year. I find that these days even if I tried to do that I’d be stuck. I have no idea what I want for the future anymore.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever you read about personal branding or goal setting at some point the concept of a “Personal Mission Statement” comes up. That’s where you write about what you stand for, what matters to you and where you are going. The problem is I’m not really sure what I stand for. I wouldn’t want it to sound like some generic buzzword taco salad. I’m pretty sure integrity is a loaded word.

Do I want to be the best PHP developer in the world? Not really, I think I’m good enough. Do I want to learn new things? Sure, I’ve thought about learning more about business, marketing, data mining and I’d like to get back into drawing. Do any of these things represent my personal brand? I don’t know, maybe?

How do you know what you stand for? How to you pick goals?

Today I logged into Google Reader and saw that I had 230 unread items. This is not unusual, nor it is particularly difficult to get through. However, that is what’s in my “inbox” between when I checked it last night and when I woke up this morning. I’m not sure how many items I get in a typical work day. It’s probably over 1,000 because I follow 90 RSS feeds.

Sure many of these feeds are pretty much dead where the author hasn’t posted something in months like my friend Dan hasn’t had a post since March. But others make up for them with many posts per day like Boing Boing and TechCrunch.

The question is “How do you manage all this data?” Right now, I manage it by having all my feeds broken up into category folders so I can go in and read the high value categories first and if I have time go through the more interesting ones. The second thing is I don’t actually go through all the items, rather I just scan the titles, read the ones that catch my eye then hit “Mark All As Read”. The problem with this is I’m constantly feeling like I’m missing important stuff. I’m sure I’m missing stuff when I scan over the 110 items in the “Technology and Geek Culture” folder. Other times, once I go through the big folders I’ll just open up “All Items” and glance at the rest pulled together.

A metric that I’d like to use, but currently have no easy way to generate is the comparison between volume and quality. If there is a feed where I get three posts a year it doesn’t really matter if it’s high or average quality. If I get 400 messages a day from a feed then I’d better be getting some real value from it. The question is, how do I determine if a feed is of a high enough value to me to keep it around? There are some very interesting feeds that I’ve unsubscribed from in the past because the volume to quality ratio was way out of whack, like the feed from “Hacker News”.

One metric I could use is the number of starred pages I have from that feed. However that doesn’t paint the whole picture because of how I use starred pages. I typically star pages if I want to come back to it later. For instance, if I’m going through my feeds from my iPhone (very important for keeping my unread numbers in check) and I see something interesting that is not going to be pleasant to view on an iPhone (links to video, really long articles, etc) then I’ll just star it so I can get back to it when I’m at a computer.

I could create my own reader or at least some sort of feed filter. I could thumbs up or down items that I’ve read and keep track of all the metrics I want. However this would probably take more time then I’m willing to put in to the task.

What I’m leaning towards is abandoning my rigorous categorization of feeds on topic. Perhaps I should try to start grouping them on other criteria. Maybe they could be “Low Volume”, “High Value” and “Low Value” with a few special groups like “Friends & Family” thrown in for good measure. That way I won’t miss the once in a while posts in the “Low Volume” category and I can ignore the “Low Value” feeds most of the time, or at least not look at them as closely as the feeds in “High Value”.

UPDATE: I’ve just reordered and cleaned out my feed reader. I now have 4 folders, the three I mentioned above and an additional “Humor” folder for a couple random comic strips. I also reduced my feed count from 90 to 58. Let’s see how this works.

Ever since I got my TiVo back in 2006 I’ve been a huge fan of it. True, it’s frustrating to have to attach the little infrared lights to my cable box, and although the DVR functionality works amazingly, many of the other features leave a lot to be desired.

Last year before I was preparing to move to California I decided to cancel my cable and TiVo subscription. I did not plan to have cable when I got to San Mateo. My subscription was very difficult to cancel. First, I had to call them because there is no way to cancel TiVo online. Then the person I got on the phone acted like if I canceled TiVo they were going to get beaten. This wasn’t the normal “Here are a list of reasons you should stay a subscriber” routine, it was more of a “please, please, please don’t quit or they will cut my fingers off” routine. Odd, right? Regardless, they canceled my subscription and that was that.

A couple months ago, now back in Madison, I decided to get cable again and of course I reactivated my TiVo subscription. Apparently that was a big mistake.

Last week, I got AT&T U-verse installed. Part of that package is I get a DVR which for no extra cost per month does 95% of what I used my TiVo for. In addition to that, it can record four shows at once, does not require any IR cables and if I subscribed to them, it would record HD content. Pretty sweet deal, eh? The closest way to match that setup with TiVo would be to get the new TiVo HD which only records two shows at once, and if I want to avoid IR cables I’d have to get two CableCards so it could decode the signal. One of those boxes cost $299.99 plus $12.95/month for the data feed that tells it what shows are on and when.

When I had cable, I had considered buying one of these. My existing TiVo does not record HD and does not support CableCard. $299.99 would not have been that bad of a deal. However with U-verse that doesn’t seem like that good of a deal anymore.

So since I have U-verse, there is no sense in continuing to pay for cable and TiVo. I call Charter and tell them I want to cancel, they have their methods to try to keep me, but generally it’s offering me a discount, or switching me to a different plan. When I say “no thanks, I just want to cancel” they do it and that’s it.

TiVo was another story. First when I tried to cancel I got the pleading person on the other end again.
TiVo: Wha.. wha.. why would you ever want to cancel your TiVo?
Me: I don’t have cable anymore (technically true)
TiVo: You can use it with an antenna to record over the air broadcasts
Me: Yeah, I don’t watch network TV
And it goes on and on. Eventually I get him to agree to cancel it with one caveat. I’m going to get charged in one lump sum the remainder of my one year contract, something like $140. Are you kidding me?

I can understand having a minimum contract if I got a discount when buying my TiVo “Save $100 on a new TiVo with a one year subscription” or something like that. This is an old TiVo that they have gotten more then a years worth of subscription out of. Just because I reactivated it two months ago and now want to cancel they are going to screw me.

I’m sorry but this isn’t the way to keep customers. Yes, I was canceling my service, but I still had a positive image of TiVo. If I ever got cable again I would probably buy the HD TiVo and they would get more money out of me. Instead, they played hardball in order to not lose the $140 for my one year of subscription and in exchange just made an enemy. I understand that TiVo is going out of business, they are having a real hard time competing with the DVRs from the cable and satellite providers. This however is not how you compete. You don’t keep customers by making it harder for them to quit, you make it so they don’t want to quit.

When TiVo came out it was an incredibly innovative product. Now it’s just another DVR, albeit a DVR with a really great, easy to use interface. My U-verse DVR took me about 10 minutes to figure out completely. It’s actually a pretty easy to use interface, especially with all the on demand stuff built in.

Maybe TiVo is doomed. It certainly is if they keep trying to do what they are currently doing. They are trying to innovate by tacking on all these half baked extra features that frequently don’t work and certainly don’t feel like a part of the whole interface. I had been really excited when I found out Rhapsody was coming to the TiVo. I’m a huge fan of Rhapsody despite its flaws. However the TiVo client rarely works. It might play one or two songs before crashing. I tried using TiVo to go which should allow me to move my recordings over to my computer to play when I’m not at home. Why then was it all crippled with some odd DRM? I should have just been able to copy an MP2 or MP4 off of the box and do what I wanted with it.

I’m not sure what they can do to become innovative again. Needless to say I don’t plan on continuing to care. They have completely lost me as a customer and as an advocate.

UPDATE: I just got a call from TiVo and since I was only 10 days outside of my 30 day cancellation window they are allowing me to cancel without the fee. Thanks TiVo!

Today I was playing around with the Online Commercial Intention tool on Microsoft’s adCenter Labs. Just for fun I typed in a couple PHP content management systems I’ve used to see how they rank and came across some interesting results. If you haven’t used the OCI tool before, it gives you a ranking for how likely someone searching for that term is looking or willing to buy something. You get a number between 0 and 1 describing the probability. Here are the results…

I was e-mailing a friend the other day talking about PHP frameworks. He’s been writing one for himself and I’ve written many many frameworks and CMSs through the years. I’ve also looked at a lot of existing frameworks out there like Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Solar, Symfony and I’ve come to a conclusion. There are a lot of similarities between PHP frameworks and governments.

If you don’t use a framework of some sort (I’m using a loose definition of framework) you would have anarchy. I’ve seen a lot of anarchy in PHP code. No consistency, code all over the place, probably insecure.

There are Libertarian frameworks, that provide some structure and common libraries but generally leave you to your own devices. They are lightweight, so they don’t use up too many resources and they are flexible. A Libertarian framework will probably not force you to use an ORM to connect to the database.

On the other end of that spectrum are the Fascist frameworks. They tell you how to lay out your code, how to write your controllers, how to write your templates and don’t even think about writing a line of SQL because you’ll be using ActiveRecord. These work because you don’t have to think much. Everything just works, you don’t have SQL injection problems, everything is filtered properly and forms are a piece of cake (as long as you don’t care how they look.)

Where does your favorite framework fall on the political spectrum?