Fun and fascinating post on Typographica on fonts from last year…
Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012 | Typeface Reviews | Typographica: “Some years are stronger than others. 2012 was a strong year. The rich diversity in new type design has never been so evident.”
Going to have to use a few of these myself.
There’s really nothing like seeing a pup in post dog park bliss. It literally takes years off of your life to see such happiness (notice Willie’s missing two bottom teeth… we’re getting close to puppy adolescence).
Now that Google has officially killed Google Reader, I’ve decided to make sure my feed here doesn’t get borked in a similar fashion when Google decides to kill Feedburner.
So, my RSS feed is back home at http://samharrelson.com/feed. I’ve got about 800 people who are subscribed to the RSS feed, so if you’re seeing that through the old link, you’ll need to resubscribe to get updates. Sorry. Pull the band-aid and all.
It’s only a matter of time before Google kills Feedburner now that it has officially divorced RSS.
Some folks on Twitter have asked what RSS reader I’m going to be switching to now that Reader is dead (dying quickly) and if I’m using Feedly.
I’m not using Feedly although it looks pretty nice. I’ve actually switched back to Fever. I’ve been an on-again-off-again user of the service for years since it launched and have it installed on this service. It’s fantastic and all but definitely not something for everyone (or most). For one, it’s a server side install and for two it’s not something that looks anything like Google Reader or a snappy web app in 2013 and for three it’s not being heavily developed.
That being said, it’s located on my server, does a great job and delivers an awesome experience whether I’m on my Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Chromebook or Macbook. So, for those things and more, it’s perfect for me. If you’re geeky, go try it out.
All that to say, RSS is insanely important to me. Google Reader has been the hub of my web experience over the past six or so years since I decided to invest myself in it as my main feed-reading platform over the likes of Bloglines or NetNewsWire or Netvibes. I’m sad to see it go and I fear the worst for the once-beloved and under-developed Feedburner platform as well.
I need a solid and reliable RSS reader to navigate the 256 sites I currently subscribe to and try to religiously read through each day. It’s something I do that is evidently old fashioned and antiquated now, but oh so incredibly valuable nonetheless.
Now we just need to get this narrowed down to states (and eventually zips):
AvantLink Launches Geolocation Affiliate Tool – Affiliate Marketing Blog: “AvantLink has announced an update to their affiliate recruitment and application management tools.
Merchants can now search for affiliates based on the originating country for the majority of an affiliates traffic.”
I have to solidly disagree with this:
Yes, creative curation is the new Google Reader! RT @heatherrocco: "Social media is now your news aggregator." @rkiker #nynjgs13
— Rich Kiker (@rkiker) March 15, 2013
RSS still matters a great deal.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ (even Tumblr)…these social gardens with their nice walls are fantastic but social “curation” isn’t the right path ahead for establishing a real presence on the web because you’re always serving a master that could go away.
There’s nothing like having a namespace that identifies and/or reflects you.
It’s something I try to get through to students, clients, friends and family.
That’s why I like the idea of dogfooding the open web and encouraging others to do so. Eventually after the social web bubble pops, we’ll get back to the realization that having yourname.com or some iteration thereof is insanely powerful and needed.
Now that Google Reader is dead, I’m switching back to Fever for my RSS reading. I literally live in my RSS reader and it’s a beyond-valuable piece of technology that drives everything from my business to my research to my studies to my obsessions to my love of history etc. Having a reliable, synced and powerful RSS reader capable of handling the 500 or so feeds I (try to) read on a daily basis is important.
Yes, Fever is a pesky self-installed piece of software that is definitely not for everyone. I’d suggest something like Feedly or Pulse or Flipboard for 99% of people.
However, for those of us who were there when blogging was The Social Network and RSS feed reading was the Newsfeed back in 2004, something like Flipboard just doesn’t cut it.
Fever is fantastic for my needs. Again, it’s a self-install and has minimal amounts of developer involvement, but it’s a fantastic program. The fact that it is self-hosted on my server that I pay for and have to keep up makes me like it even more for some Google-Reader-backlash-lizard-brain reason.
Since I’m mostly on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 these days when I’m not using my Chromebook or this Macbook Pro Retina, I’ve been testing out Meltdown app as my mobile interface for Fever. It seems to be doing the job just fine at the moment and is a great Android experience for Fever. It’s a no-frills and minimalistic take on feed reading, but that’s exactly what I was looking for.
Maybe Marco is right and it is excellent news for the RSS reader industry (and RSS in general) that Google Reader is shutting down.
For once, I’m glad that I wasn’t at a major tech product release and could watch the debacle unfold via a YouTube livestream from the comfort of home:
Robert Scoble – Google+ – Samsung really screwed up with its Galaxy S4 presentation.…
It’s inevitable, but still sad that Google is shutting down Google Reader rather than letting it (and its valuable API that allows so many services to use it for a syncing backend) die a long and gentle death.
The “social web” is a fascinating beast. When I first started blogging in 2002, I was enamored with the idea of having a domain name that reflected who I was and a place to put my ideas, pictures, scraps, polished pieces and serve as my home base of a digital footprint.
Geeks and folks on the web needed a way to stay in touch with updates from friends and people they were interested in. I experimented with Newsgator, FeedDemon, Liferea (LInux FEed REAder during my time using Ubuntu as my OS from 2006-2009) but finally settled with Google Reader as my hub of consuming online content.
In many ways, Google Reader was the first Facebook NewsFeed for nerds, geeks, web heads and those of us who cared about the web.
When 2006 – 2007 came and birthed Twitter and Facebook’s rapid growth, things changed quickly. The idea of having your own webspace was traded for the ability to leverage something like Twitter or Facebook’s growing user base for exposure. You didn’t have to explain feeds, that ugly orange RSS button or readers to your friends and family and you could just point them to your name. The walled gardens won.
Here’s a great post from Tantek laying out similar themes of loss-yet-optimism for a new hope:
On Silos vs an Open Social Web [#indieweb] – Tantek: “The answer is not to not ‘only [be] relevant to geeks’, but rather, reframe it as a positive, and be relevant to yourself. That is, design, architect, create, and build for yourself first, others second. If you’re not willing to run your design/code on your own site, for your primary identity on the web, day-in and day-out, why should anyone else? If you started something that way but no longer embrace it as such, start over. Go Selfdogfood or go home.”
This can easily be dismissed as one of those “first world problems” for geeks who care too much about whatever the open web happens to be. However, many many people still use the backend plumbing of RSS to do great things and change the world. You use RSS more than you realize anytime you do most anything on the web (outside and inside of walled gardens).
I’ll admit, this has definitely caused me to re-ponder my own web existence. This is a self-hosted WordPress blog, but my personal blog with my name on it at samharrelson.com is hosted through the awesome Shareist service that I love. Should I move that back to self-hosting so that I can self-dogfood?
One of the many things I’ll be pondering in the coming days as I think about the way the web is heading the next few years.
Whether it’s this blog or Thinking.FM or StudiesLab or Harrelson Agency (and even more soon), I can’t agree more with Daniel here…
An Indie State Of Mind – Bitsplitting.org: “Like Marco, I derive a great amount of satisfaction from doing things for myself. Also like Marco, it can sometimes be a fault. No doubt I would benefit in many ways from working for a company or from joining a podcasting network. The resources and reach of these institutions could help me build greater things and get them in the hands of more people. On the other hand, they could force me to build things that suck. Folks like us, we with an indie state of mind, tend to face a far simpler choice: be dissatisfied working for somebody else, or gratified by the thrill of trying our own thing.”
Maybe it’s just my only-child mindset, but I’ve always found it’s a lot more enjoyable to work with people rather than for people.
And that’s the beauty of something like affiliate marketing.
Pinterest has announced their iteration of web analytics for bloggers, businesses and groups with a verified website in the profile of the popular sharing service:
Introducing Pinterest Web Analytics – Pinterest Blog: “Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, “what are people pinning from my websites?” These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting. Today, we’re pleased to announce Pinterest Web Analytics, a first step towards doing just that. Web Analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites.”
Getting your website verified by Pinterest is a pretty painless and straightforward process involving dropping some code into the header of your site.
Most interesting is the ability to see stats on not just your pins but also repins as well as impressions and clicks. This should make many of the marketers and businesses that have been eyeing Pinterest but not sold on the platform because lack of analytics happy.
This isn’t a good thing for sites such as PinReach that have sprung up to fulfill the need for analytics and insight into Pinterest trends. However, much like Twitter’s once flourishing API coral reef (still a great post six years later), these sites can become interesting platforms to dig deeper or look at other types of social engagement outside of what Pinterest itself offers.
Pinterest is definitely upping the social media involvement ante with businesses as it continues to scale its user base and explore areas of monetization and ad serving in a different path than either Twitter or Facebook.
Instead, look to LinkedIn and Twitter for further innovation in the social networking monetization space.
Hot on the heels of Samsung’s new flagship phone being released with “eye scroll tracking” as a feature comes this interesting piece from TechCrunch on what we might be in store for when marketers can stare back at mobile users…
The Implications of the Interface That Watches You – TechCrunch: “It’s no secret that companies and advertisers have been looking for a way to boost the ROI of mobile ads, Google included. Gathering facial feedback data could act like a cheat code to help marketing get to the next level – provided it isn’t wielded like a heavy, blunt club. The possibility for abuse is tremendous here: imagine ads that periodically migrate to occupy the places where you find the choicest content in an app, or autoplaying video ads that wait until you’re paying close attention before launching into a sales barrage.”
