My New RSS Diet: No News

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Until last week, I had not touched an RSS reader. My Google Reader list had become completely unsustainable, I always seemed to have hundreds of unread items.

I’ve come to the realized that RSS is a crappy way to read news. I want my RSS reader to be a personalized daily magazine. Something I can pick up at the end of the day and browse through medium to long form articles of interest to me.

Last week I put myself on a new news-free RSS diet. I started a fresh list of RSS sources with one criteria, they need to post no more than 3 times per day or so. This rule excludes all traditional news sources, most “pro-bloggers” and link-bloggers, etc.

So far it’s been working out really well, I’ve got a manageable amount of content to digest every day and I’m finally able to keep up with web comics again, since they’re not being lost in a deluge of reposted stories.

As for real news, I keep up with that on Twitter and Reddit. Easy peasy livin’ greezy.

I still haven’t found a really great RSS reader though, but that’s another post.

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Blog First, Tweet Later

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WordCamp Winnipeg was absolutely amazing! I’ve literally been waiting my career to see this calibre of event in Winnipeg.

David Pensato gave a really great talk about the future of social blogging. He made the keen observation that, with Facebook, Twitter and the like we are all blogging all the time.

As an experiment, I am going to challenge myself to write a blog post instead of a Facebook status update, or tweet. I’m already seeing some potential issues with this idea, more on that later.

Oh yeah, Peter Chester’s talk on measuring WordPress performance was one of the best tech talks I’ve seen, ever!  Slides are here.

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The best comment evar!

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In reply to my August 2008 post “5 Reasons Tim Hortons Sucks” danno604 just wrote:

Food is Appaulling, bordering on Euthenasia for the Elderly.
Tim Hortons has horribly poor quality food — loaded with hydrogenated oils, white flour and sugar. The sandwiches and soup are so laden with sodium my tongue is sore.

I’m mystified why this place is a magnet for old people. Is this some kind of end-of life instinct, like dolphins beaching themselves, to go to Tims?

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Please don’t customize social media icons

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When I put on my front-end developer hat, I’m often the last line of defence between the client and an unfortunate typo, bad idea or missed opportunity. I’m the last pair of eyes to examine a design before it hits the development environment. Designers probably hate me for it, but if I see a design choice that doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll mention it.

One of the most common design choice that irks me is customized social media icons. Web designers seem to have an inescapable need to redesign Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever.app’s icons to match the overall look and feel of the site. One one hand, I can almost understand the appeal, these logos can stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, that’s the entire point!

Brands like Twitter and Facebook spend massive amounts of time and money tweaking their identity. They spend even more money marketing their brand, getting it in everybody’s face. Facebook’s white ‘F’, Twitter’s blue bird are immediately recognizable. In my humble opinion, if you actually want website’s visitor to notice and use those sharing features I’m supposed to implement, it’s probably a good idea to follow the social network’s brand guidelines. If you want people to share your content or follow the @account, it’s not a great idea to have the social media icons BLEND IN WITH THE REST OF THE SITE!

I’d love to do an A/B test to examine this theory.

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The SimCity Débâcle: A Case for EA

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I was one of the nerd horde desperately following news of the new SimCity’s release. Eating up every glassbox demo video on youtube. Visiting the website daily to check the release date. When March 5th rolled around, I convinced my wife to let me install Windows on her MacBook Pro and sat there eagerly awaiting my download.

That was 10 days ago.

Today, to put it lightly, the game is not living up to expectations.

A short list of the reported issues with the game:

  • Server capacity issues leaving game unplayable.
  • Always-On “DRM” annoying gamers.
  • Broken AI, causing serious gameplay issues.
  • Broken simulation, in the form of incorrect population reports.
  • Map size too small.

And on and on and on. Take a look at the unofficial subreddit for more details if you’re so inclined.

Many redditors and gamers in general have called foul, accusing EA and Maxis of lying and deceiving customers in an attempt to boast sales. Frankly those claims are not unfounded. EA has a history of poor customer service, etc.

But what if EA simply under estimated the number of people interested in the game. What if EA has no clue who buys their games? This would explain the utter brokeness of the servers at launch.

It might explain why they decided to release such a buggy game. If they completely failed to understand how many people would buy the game, they may have thought it would take much longer for the bugs to surface. They might have assumed they had more time to address the bugs.

The always-online gameplay model allows EA to iterate. If AI is broken, they can fix it, release a patch and instantaneously fix everyone’s experience. Iteration is good.

 

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