How to Tame the Google Reader Beast
I cannot live without Google Reader, but I've heard from quite a few of my rss-friendly friends lately that they are overwhelmed by their reader. Fair enough. It's not easy when that tab in your browser is taunting you with "Google Reader (1000+)". On top of all the responsibilities we have, the last thing we need is to feel guilty about all the reading we have to get to.
While I have had the cursed 1000+ appear, I am not daunted by this. Here's how I cope without simply hitting the "Mark All As Read" link.
1. Make sure feeds are organized in a way that makes sense to you, so that you can go to what you need to/are most interested in, most quickly. I work for an education nonprofit, responsible for web marketing and production. So, here's my list: "education", "marketing", "nonprofit", "search", "web" and the very important "life" category.
2. Always make time for the feeds in your "life". For me, this folder includes Bostonist, Mint.com, CNN Political Ticker and (I'm not ashamed to admit this) Pop Candy. I think it's really important to take a break from the constant web work and have a little fun or even just deal with the other priorities in your life, be it finance, politics or pop culture. Yes, I know we should still go for a walk, but sometimes it's more convenient to go for a mental walk instead.
3. Skimming is necessary. The beauty of the Google Reader is that it's designed for skimming. It's amazing the way our brains can adapt to bits of information rapidly flying through the screen. I've managed to go through hundreds of feeds, finding the ones that are really relevant to me, or that I want to learn more about, pretty easily. Now that I've fully converted to Mac, I've found that one of its wonderful features is the two-finger touch scroll. Wow. Talk about skimming. I can fly through TechCrunch feeds like Evelyn Wood.
5. You can still hit Mark All As Read, but be selective here. Go through your feeds in each folder, by each website. See the ones with the big numbers? Be honest with yourself. If you've got 400 posts from this website, will you ever really go through all of them? If you think you will, great. Set aside some quality time and do it. It's really important to you, so you'll make the time. If you think you won't, hit Unsubscribe. It's better than hitting "Mark all as Read" all the time, because the chances of you getting to 1000+ will lessen. Also, chances are if you're subscribing to similar web sites, you'll get duplicates anyway. Choose your favorite(s) of the similar ones and unsubscribe from the others. If you want to delve deeper into a post you read about, do a blog search and you'll likely end up finding more good stuff. And who knows, maybe you'll find out about some other great blogs!
Twitter and Facebook and Blogs, oh my
I've finally caved and now belong to the world of twitter. God, I feel so generic. Everyone I know who is on twitter now has had this dilemma and has eventually "succumbed" to twitter. But there was a confluence of events that brought me to it.
- My ED started talking about it. I feel like at that point, I'd better get on things.
- Boston Girl Geeks are all over it.
- I do status updates on facebook... so clearly I already know how to write short sentences.
So great, now you can find me there @remtheory and I have more places to add useless information in short spurts. I can't wait to see what's next.
Fight the Smears
Absolutely fantastic. Another reason I love Obama and his campaign style.
The girl geek in me LOOOVES this
Oh Hil, why couldn't you speak to us? Are you too busy talking to the white working class democrats? Telling your man to hush up and stop stealing the limelight? Have you forgotten about us liberal intellectual gals who rock the Web? Barack hasn't. Just more evidence that just because someone may look more like me, doesn't mean they represent me better.
My first post on girly geekdom
Why limit myself to REMTheory when there are other fabulous girly geeks like myself with a desire to write nerd?
You can read about my experience at the Berkman@10 Conference there.
Library of Congress and Flickr – what a beautiful match
This is so exciting! I use Flickr to house my own photos and I'm thrilled to say we use Flickr at work, too, but what the Library of Congress is proposing is really revolutionary in that a very large, extremely credible and federal (!!) institution is venturing into the world of online community and social tagging and encouraging other libraries and other cultural institutions to do the same by using all that Flickr has to offer.
You can see the collection of over 3000 gorgeous photos (one set from the 1930s and 1940s, the other from the 1910s) here.
It's great for the LOC because they're getting free help with their metadata. It's great for everybody because everyone will have better access to more complete information about a particular photograph and be able to directly contribute. Very exciting! Have I already said it's exciting? 
LOC writes about it here and Flickr writes about it here. David Weinberger (who I found out from) writes about it here.
Website Launches
I just launched a website for the yoga teacher that had a real part in making me a mentally and physically stronger person. I was so flattered when Coeli asked me to work on her website, I just jumped at the chance. So, here it is... http://www.coelimarsh.com!
I made it using Wordpress (what my blog runs on). I could have made it from Drupal, but I've found that if you're not doing any heavy theme work and the site isn't complex, Wordpress is really the way to go.
The opposite was true for mcgtraining.com, which already had an existing design. I found myself struggling to theme in Wordpress, whereas I find it much easier to do so in Drupal. My instinct said to try Wordpress, though, because it's such a small site, but hey, I learned from my mistakes and now it's all done.
Two happy websites!
Barbara Moratek of the Ivete Foundation – beware
Last week I received an email from Barbara Moratek of the Ivete Foundation with a very simple and seemingly genuine email. The subject line was "Information for prospective donors" and the content said:
"Would you have additional information for prospective donors or volunteers other than what is on your website? Thank you in advance.
Warm regards,
Barb
Barbara Moratek
Vice President, Director of Grant Programs
Ivete Foundation
Phone-
Fax- 800.397.7205
Web- www.ivetefoundation.org"
Now, the lack of a phone number should have been an indicator. My work email is hardly out there, either, and certainly not in a development capacity. But I passed it onto our development staff to see if they could help her. Fortunately, several other random people in our org got the same email. So, development smartly did some research and it turns out it was a scam. I was surprised and frankly, bothered, by the fact that someone would specifically target nonprofits. Gross.
Free Rice
I'm so happy that I'm seeing this on not just my nonprofit blog feeds, but also on my general web feeds. The word is spreading, hooray! So, I'll help too:
See Free Rice tests your vocabulary, feeds others at one of my newest favorite blogs.
Good help and software is hard to find and assess
My head has been spinning this past week. I've been on a mission to help my org sort out a technology problem. Can we get a one-stop-shop hosted, yet fully customizable (i.e. template mods and form field additions) transaction platform that includes event registration, donations (one-time and recurring, preferably) and a store? Oh, yeah, and it should be affordable and not lock us into a contract. We're a nonprofit, so we can demand these things... right?
Well, the good news is that there are options, but it's been so difficult to find. GiftTool seems to do what we want, but I'm nervous that there hasn't been much use and we can't play with it ourselves before signing on the dotted line (only remote demo from a sales dude). There's Click and Pledge, Shopify (doesn't really do events), NEON, MemberClicks and some others. But how are we supposed to know who to trust? What's good? What have others used? It's an incredibly labor-intensive process.
Well, I've got a few thoughts on the matter and am hoping to help implement something that will solve this problem, so I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you've got any thoughts on these tools, they're welcome!
Oh, and one more thing. After sending out feelers about this problem to some tech listservs, I also sent out a feeler for a freelance developer. Surprisingly, no one responded to this call either. I'm wondering if my delivery's off, I haven't hit the right group of people, or there's just a lack of flash developer freelancers out there. The hunt continues!