photo credit: Sr. Cosa de Daniel Henríquez

Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you’ve subscribed to (click on “View all items” to see all the posts).

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Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, Google Reader, RSS

An article I wrote for Make Use Of. If you didn’t know already, there are many shortcuts for Google Reader. This article describes some of those shortcuts.

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Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, Productivity, reader, RSS, shortcuts

I am so overloaded with unread RSS feeds that sometimes I go through what I call “RFS” (RSS Fatigue Syndrome). It’s like a drug - you know you need to cut back but when you do, you feel like you’re missing out on something and you end up going back to it. Plus, my work writing this blog and also writing for Make Use Of and Google Tutor kind of requires me to read daily RSS feeds so that I have something to blog about.

So my curiosity was aroused when I read on Digital Inspiration (one of my favourite blogs) that there was now a “RSS Panic Button” which gave you the option to mark all feeds as read once your unread list hit a certain number (you can specify the number). I thought “ha! just the thing!” but when I investigated, I discovered that this wasn’t a standalone software application but instead a new integrated feature of Feed-Demon 2.6.

While I like the idea of a RSS panic button to wipe unread feeds, I am too married to my Google Reader to move to another RSS reader. So I hope someone at Google sees the RSS panic button idea and adopts it for use in Google Reader!

Technorati Tags: Feed Demon, Google Reader, panic button, RSS

I got a huge shock this morning when I came online and looked at the RSS count on the blog. It said 65. Yesterday it was 152 so you can imagine how shocked I was that I had lost 87 subscribers overnight. I was so disillusioned that I was ready to give up blogging and become a monk. (well, not really!).

Then I read John Chow’s blog and discovered the cause. He lost 5000 subscribers overnight and went hunting for the cause. It turns out that the missing subscribers use Google Reader. It seems that Google has turned off Feedfetcher which delivers the number of Google Reader users to blog RSS counts.

Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have my subscriber count back up to normal.

Fingers crossed.

Technorati Tags: feedfetcher, Google, Google Reader, John Chow, reader, RSS