ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • I haven’t tweeted in a week

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    July 11, 2013 is the day I realized Twitter was turning me into a bad internet person.

    I watched my Twitter stream flow by all day that day and I couldn’t think of a nice, polite, constructive response to any single one of the tweets flowing by. It’s not that the people I follow are terrible human beings who post mindless drivel. In fact, I’ve recently trimmed my followers down to a short list of quality tweeters.

    I realized that I was becoming a snarky asshole. Every moment I spent looking at Twitter was a moment I spent forcing myself not to be a jerk in public.

    In my previous post I wrote that I use Twitter as a “real news” source. But to be honest over the past week, I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything.

    I doubt I’ll write another 13,367 tweets.

    The larger question here is whether this is truly a “me problem” or a Twitter problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.