Sites that are essential to my day

Bryan Person asks: Which 5 sites are most essential to your daily workflow?

For work, the key sites for me are:

• Gmail. Always the first one to be opened on my browser. I start and end every day with a 'mail run' but I don't have it up all the time.
• 30boxes. I usually have the mobile version loaded because the view defaults to today's activities and it's easy enough to add new events to my calendar. I only switch to the web version when I'm moving things around because the drag-and-drop feature is perfect for that.
• Google Search. I typically use the search toolbar in Firefox, and rarely does a day go by without me performing at least one search.
  
• Dictionary.com. I do a lot of writing and editing in my job, so having ready access to an online dictionary is absolutely necessary.
  
• TwitBin. For the times when I just want to clear my head, I keep TwitBin, a Firefox extension for Twitter, open on my browser.

Once I'm done with my work day, my focus shifts to sites that are more in line with my personal hobbies and interests:

• Blogger. My blogging platform of choice, simply because it's easy and I'd much rather leave the management of the whole blogging infrastructure to Google.
• Google Reader. An indispensable tool for keeping up with conversations all over the web. When I'm on the road and stuck somewhere with nothing to do, I can also fire up the browser on my Treo phone and read my feeds using the mobile version.
  

I expect to eventually reclassify Google Reader as a work-related site because I'm starting to find feeds that are directly relevant to my work -- a trend that is quite gratifying to see.

Why I Use Google Reader in 2 Modes

I started using Google Reader four months ago, and haven't looked back since.

Now that I've had a few months of usage under my belt, I've learned that I get the most out of this application when I use it in two distinct modes, and always in the same order.

First, I go through my 'Must Read' feeds

There are two dozen or so feeds that I make a point of reading every time I log into Google Reader because they're either written by people I find interesting, or they focus on topics that I find interesting.

Although these feeds cover a broad range of topics, I tag them all as 'Cool Stuff' so they're all next to each other in my subscription tree and I can go through them quickly.

After going through the 'Cool Stuff,' I then go through the personal blogs (all tagged 'Personal') of both real-world friends and people I follow online. These are blogs or feeds that would probably not interest most people, but the content is relevant to me either because of friendships or because of the personalities involved.

Then I Switch to 'River of News' Mode

Once I've covered the feeds that I consider high priority, I click on the "All Items" link in the upper left corner of Google Reader, and that switches me into a mode which Dave Winer has aptly named 'river of news.'

I first learned of this mode of reading from Robert Scoble and I can see why it works if you follow a lot of feeds.

In this mode, Google Reader lists all the news items chronologically, regardless of the origin of the feed. It makes for some really strange topic jumps as you move from item to item, but since these items are of lower priority and I'm sure I've already read the 'must read' items, I can swim through the river quickly. It's when I'm reading in this mode that effective headlines and opening paragraphs determine whether or not the post gets read.

Every now and then, a feed in the 'river of news' proves itself to be consistently interesting. When that happens, I simply promote the feed to 'Cool Stuff.' Google Reader makes it easy to change the tags on feeds, so it literally takes only a second or two to update and reclassify.

A final note: I wrote this entry because Bryan Person recently asked people to share tips about their use of Google Reader.

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This specific entry (Why I Use Google Reader in 2 Modes) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Google Reader Mobile leads to Feed Pruning

I'd been meaning to prune the list of RSS feeds that I follow on Google Reader, but always managed to put off the task.

Tonight, I finally found a good reason to sit down and do it: Google Reader's Mobile-friendly version.

The mobile version of Reader has actually been available for 11 months, but I was unaware that it existed, since I only started paying attention to mobile versions of websites this year.

Given the limited screen size that mobile browsers have, I don't want to be wasting time and money loading links and feeds that are no longer relevant to me, hence the feed pruning.

One other happy side effect: I've rediscovered wonderful feeds that I had been ignoring for a while because I had not yet gotten around to classifying them correctly. It's always good to unearth old, forgotten treasures.

Feedburning in Progress

Thanks to a recent post on the Google Reader Blog, I finally went through the trouble of signing up for a Feedburner account and adding RSS subscription buttons to my sidebar.

Doing this was a lot easier than I thought it would be, thanks to some lovely widget integration between Feedburner and the new, improved Blogger.

I don't really expect to have a lot of subscribers, but I like getting a feel of the different nuances involved in running a blog, without the pressure of actually managing a professional one.

Recent Sidebar Updates

Made a couple of updates to my blog's sidebar this week.

I updated the Twitter widget so it now displays the three most recent 'tweets' instead of just one. Also changed the display order somewhat by putting the time before the text. It was fairly easy to do, thanks to this great blogpost from Jon Aquino, which I found via Twitter's FAQs.

What I'd love to do eventually is to restyle the display to look like the Twitter widget in Brad Kellett's blog, Pantsland. He groups his entries by day and displays the actual time, rather than the relative time after each text blurb.

Also added a Google Reader widget to the sidebar, under 'Recent Reads'. This widget displays items that I've opted to 'share' while reading through my various RSS subscriptions using Google Reader.

It does not yet look quite as nice as I'd like... but I'm fairly confident I can prettify it once I've got some time on my hands, since it just takes a bit of CSS.

I can't help but feel happy when I look at the sidebar now, because these two recent changes really complement my existing Flickr widget, which displays my most recent public photos.

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Update - Feb 16:
Finally have my 'Recent Reads' widget styled, thanks to bits of CSS from the Google Reader Blog.

Now on Google Reader

I realized the other day (as I was migrating all my RSS subscriptions from Bloglines to Google Reader via OPML) that I had really fallen behind on my Blog and News reading.

I had finally decided to try Google Reader because of a post about the "Attention Economy" that I had seen on Sam Sethi's blog about European Startups, Vecosys. The statistics that they collect and report back to you are particularly interesting and on that basis alone I decided to switch.

The user interface didn't take much getting used to, most likely because it is a bit reminiscent of Gmail and it behaved how I would have expected it to -- allowing me to expand and collapse posts as needed, among others. The ability to tag and star things also helps.