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A HOWTO and a question.

I used to have a bunch of blogs stored in my del.icio.us account, with a link on my Firefox toolbar so I could load them all in one go and read them. Unfortunately, the toolbar's RSS menus maxed out at ten or twelve items, so I couldn't keep very many in there before it started dropping some off. About a year ago then, I took thelancrewitch's advice and started used RSS feeds instead.

The easy way to use RSS is to set your home page to iGoogle. Go to Google, click the iGoogle link at the top, then click Sign In. Make yourself a GMail account if you're the last person in civilisation to still not have one. Now you'll be presented with your new Google homepage. Make that your default page (in Firefox on Windows it's Tools | Options | Main | Use Current Page; in Firefox on Linux it's Edit | Preferences | Main | Use Current Page; Gods know what it is in Safari or Opera; and nobody uses Internet Explorer so I won't bother telling you how to do it there). Now click the close boxes on the default set of widgets on your page, and go to Add Stuff to add new ones. The one you particularly want is Google Reader. Type it into the search (what did you expect - a directory? This is Google!) and click the Add It Now button.

Now you're ready to add feeds. Go to each of your favourite blogs, and click the orange RSS logo that appears either on the page or on your address bar. Follow the prompts to add it to Google Reader (note: not Add To Google Homepage; it does the wrong thing). Once you get to the Google Reader interface, just shut it and move on to your next blog; rinse, repeat. You can worry about categorising into groups later, if ever.

Now, when you want to keep up with your blogs, open your default page. All the latest entries are there: you can read them in a popup window on the Google page, or click the links to see them in their original form. Much more efficient, and you don't have to weed out the people who don't post regularly, because Out Of Sight is Out Of Mind.


So it's good. Much more efficient. I have a hundred subscriptions, apparently, and they're all easy to manage. My question is this: what shall I add to my list? Are there any blogs out there that people like and think I might like too? I can't see an easy way to publish my current subs so you can skim them, but that's OK: this is partly to get new stuff to read, and partly to see what people think I might like. If you happen to guess ones I already have, that's bonus clever points for you...

Edit: smangesable suggested NetVibes instead of Google Reader, and I have to say it looks like a winner. If iGoogle gives you the steaming irrits, check out NetVibes, because it seems to be a clone that's an actual improvement. More as I examine further... tomorrow!

Useful handy hint for surviving tech breakdown:

1. Switch off your mobile phone. ^[1]
2. Take out the battery and note the details of model, capacity, voltage and so on. Note the model of the phone too.
3. Go to a specialist battery shop and buy a spare. Mine cost me less than ten bucks, I think. They're cheap.
4. Charge the spare battery up and stick it in your wallet.

Then, the next time your phone runs out of charge, you swap out the old battery and put in the new one. Voila - instant talky-talky!

Don't forget to recharge both batteries when you get a chance. That's the bit I struggle to remember.

^[1] If you're in a hurry, you can stop reading here and still come away with some very useful advice.

So here I am, typing away in my Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (ha!) text editor, and posting to LJ. The ljupdate.el package has a few missing features -- you can't go back and select previous entries for re-editing, for example -- but it's still pretty damn clever. lauredhel, apparently there's something similar for Wordpress, so if you're an adherent of the Church of the One True Editor (or willing to be converted) then it might be worth a look.

And if anyone else is looking to follow my example and post their LJs in Emacs, ( please play clicky-clicky here; otherwise read on )

Now that the crunch is finally off at work (we sent the new version to our major client yesterday! yay!) I plan to do other things with my Emacs. We use a version control system here (thank the gods -- it's one sign of a sane software development company, which is why it's the first place I've ever worked that has one) and I wrote a quick&dirty Emacs integration for it, but I want it to be the bee's knees. And there are other tasks I occasionally find myself leaving Emacs to do, which is anathema to any True Believer, so I need to find more add-ons.

If you've upgraded your Firefox^[1] to version 2.0, one of the irritations is that each tab has its own "close" button; the single button on the far right is gone. Here's how to fix that. ("Get out of Mouse Click Hell free. This card may be kept until needed or sold.")

1. Ctrl+T to open a new tab. Type about:config into the address bar and hit Enter. A list of settings will appear.
2. In the edit box at the top of the page, type or paste this: browser.tabs.closeButtons
3. The settings will disappear, replaced by one line, with the text you entered as its label, and a value of 0 or 1 or whatever the default is in Firefox 2.0.
4. Double click on it. A dialog box will open up.
5. Type 3 and hit Enter. The button should disappear from your open tabs and reappear on the right-hand side.
6. Close the "about:config" tab. You're done.

From now on, the close button will appear where it should. You don't even need to restart Firefox.

Yay!

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^[1] What's that? You're not using Firefox? What are you using? Safari, you say? Oh well, fair enough; it is kind of pretty, if that's all that matters to you. Opera? Good on you -- mob rule isn't all it's cracked up to be, and I'm sure the feeling of smug self-reliance makes the compatibility issues bearable. Internet Explorer? I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing your hard disk with spammers, anyhow; I'm sure they're grateful. And all those banner ads sure are pretty, aren't they?