Everyday, there are many different ways I get news and information delivered to me. My RSS reader is the one that delivers the most information to me, fast and in an easy to read and process way. The thing is, after about a year, my RSS reader gets filled up with feeds and begins to become slow and packed with too many feeds. This makes reading my feeds unproductive and time consuming.

Today, I though it was time to prune my feeds down to a more manageable size. After about a year of collecting feeds, I had well over 100 feeds in my reader. I managed to cut that down to under 100 feeds. I ended up trimming about 20 to 30 feeds from my reader which makes it more compact and easier to proces than a massive amount of feeds.

I first went though looking and deleted any feeds I didn’t read anymore and feeds which hadn’t been updated in a while. I also deleted any feeds which had similar content to another feed. For example, a lot of tech feeds get the same information, at the same time. there is no point at getting the same story twice so I decided which one writes the best articles and kept that one. I also sorted all my feeds into folder to make them easier to read. Instead of having 20 in one, 10 in another and 60 in another, I split them into more manageable folder with 10 or so feeds in each.

Now my RSS reader is much happier, and so am I. I don’t get as many duplicate stories and articles in my reader that I don’t care about. It is much more efficient at doing its job. I think everyone who hasn’t had a clean out of their readers shoud take some time this month to sort it out and remove the rubbish from it. I managed to shave about 4kb off my OPML file which is great in my eyes. You should have a clean out too!

• Dirty OPML (16kb)
• Clean OPML (12kb)

This morning when I woke up and started up the internet, the unusual looking Tumblr Dashboard shocked me. What had happened to the Tumblr dashboard I had gotten to know and love? Its gone and has been replaced with something better (I hope.) I really like the new dash, it is more simple to use than the old one. It is also much easier to differentiate my own posts from the posts of my followers.

Posting is still easy as ever with the same icons and functions that it always has, with the exception of the added Audio functionality. I personally wouldn’t use it but its nice to know that the option if always there if I ever wanted to use it. They have also added some advanced features to it such as dating your posts and also add tags to posts. The tag functionality isn’t quite finished and doesn’t do much right now but it will be extremely useful for searching and browsing in the near future.

Moving the friends and followers off the dashboard was a good idea. Now they are on their own individual pages. The icons are bigger so you can actually see the faces of your friends and followers and it is not in the way for the dashboard and not slowing down the page loading as well as wasting bandwidth. It would be nice though if we could still see the number of followers on the dashboard too, just like the number of friends. Another thing that would be nice to do is have the option to hide or show friends posts in the dashboard. This could remove clutter if you wanted to go and find or edit one of your own posts from a day or so ago without having your friends posts making this a little harder and time consuming.

Channels is something new they have added into Tumblr. I didn’t quite understand the feature at first but now I think I get it. Channels are a way to share things with a group of people, and its private. Only people in the channel will be able to see the content. They are going to expand the functionality of this feature by adding multi-author tumblelogs and the ability to make it public. This is another feature I’m not sure I would use but if I found a use for it, I would definitely use it as I really love the Tumblr engine.

They have reconstructed the Theme editor. I personally am not fussed over the new editor and prefer the old, simple one. Previewing the theme has been made easy and its much better than the old preview. I think its great that they have added some user created themes (from Bill Israel and Cameron Hunt) to the theme library. These guys have made amazing themes and I believe that its wonderful their works of art have been discovered and have been added. Off to the side now, the theme editor is the only place on the whole site that I managed to find the old Tumblr flower logo. I really liked that logo and would like to see it put back, and for it to become the favicon rather than the ‘T’ that is currently there. The Tumblr flower would look much better there in the tabs bar.

But now is the part of the post where I talk about the things lacking and things that I believe would make the service better. I have to do it and creative criticism is good because it helps a service grow into something good. I only have a few gripes about Tumblr, one is the fact that none of the advance features are in the bookmarklet. I use the bookmarklet for 99% of the posts I make on Tumblr, it would be nice if I could click a link and it would expand the advance options so I can tag and date posts right from there instead of going to the dashboard and editing posts to add tags and such.

On the topic of tags, when the feature is fully enabled and search and browsing via tags is usable, Tumblr should have an easy way to tag older content. At the moment the only way would be so scramble through the dashboard looking for your posts and editing them. For a lot of people, doing it this way would become impractical due to the fact that they have made thousands of posts and editing them all to add tags would be a nightmare. Also having your content mixed with others just makes the task more daunting. What is going to end up happening is people won’t bother to use the tag feature and a lot of functionality will be missed. Somehow, make an easy tag system for tagging posts without any tags so you can make sure any great content isn’t lost in the giant archives of the Tumblr.com.

There are a lot of other things under the hood and small changes that I haven’t felt the need to mention. I wish I had someone to make a new custom theme for my Tumblelog so I can catch up and have Yum9me’s Scrapbook v3 and can have a nice makeover like the main site. Anyone who is moderately interested in this service would be insane not to jump on board and at least give Tumblr a go. It is one of the web services that I love the most on the internet and I am very excited to see it grow and grow and grow. Another great update from the people at Davidville and best wishes on your next projects and Tumblr v4

For the past week, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9, codename Minefield. I generally wait till the Beta to try the upcoming version of Firefox but due to the fact I was using a temporary computer with no bookmarks or extensions to break, I decided to give it a good test run. I am extremely happy with a lot of the small changes that I came across in the alpha.

The first apparent change is with the way it handles saving password details. It is so much better than currently in Firefox 2. When you log into a website, there is no more pop-up asking you if you want to save the password for this site. Now it comes up with a small, non intrusive alert message underneath the tab bar. It is better in the fact that you it does not require you to choose an option before you can continue logging on and allows you to select an option after you have logged on to the site. This is great if you are not sure what the password is and lets you make sure you have the password correct before you let Firefox save it.

They have also redone the bookmarks system. This is still in early development and was only added to the alpha about a week or two ago. I haven’t had a good play with it considering I started fresh with no bookmarks. I think that this is going to be way better than the current system, much faster too and display more information. Probably the major thing Places is adding to the bookmarking system is tags. The allows you to easily categorize bookmarks and find/access them. One thing I don’t understand is the reason to star webpages. When you star something it doesn’t bookmark it so I don’t really see the point of it. I am sure there is a reason for it, I just haven’t been told it. I can’t wait to see Places evolve through the alpha and betas of Firefox 3.

The address bar does a little more than it does in 2.0. Now when you type in a query in the address bar, it also shows the titles of webpages and searches them for the query as well as parts of sites. For example if you typed in yum9me in the query bar, it will show the sites in your history that have yum9me in the web address and the title of the webpage. This makes it easier go to pages you already have been too but there is also a disadvantage. Lets say you were going back to a site you visited about about pork and you type “por” in the address bar, included with the site about pork will be any site you have been to with porn in the title and in the URL. That is the disadvantage of the improved address bar but lucky this wouldn’t be a problem for me

Finally, one of the things I love the most is quitting the browser. On the even of you quitting, the message that alerts you that you are closing “x” amount of tabs is a lot more useful. Not only does it alert you, it now gives you options. You can either quit the browser, save your session and quit or cancel back you didn’t mean to quit. This is very useful in my opinion because it gives you the option to save the session or not. Sometimes I will want all of these tabs to open again next time I open Firefox and sometimes I might want to start a fresh session next time. Well it now gives you the flexibility to do this easily by deciding when you quit. If you don’t need this, there is always the option to never show this message again. I love how the alpha manages quitting in a much more useful way then before.

Well that is my first impressions of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9. There is more to it than the things I have mentioned, I just can’t remember some of the other features added and a lot of the stuff will be hidden under the hood. I think Firefox 3 is going to be a great product when it gets released sometime next year. I am looking forward to it. The thing I hate the most about having used Alpha 9 was going back to Firefox 3 and missing some of the cool features. It is a bit like how I feel about Vista, there are some small features in Vista that I really miss when going back and using XP. It’s going to be nice to see how Firefox 3 handles the extensions I use as well as how Places works with the 512kb of bookmarks I have in Firefox.

Yesterday, the premiere of Tekzilla got released. Tekzilla is a technology related show hosted by Jessica Corbin and Patrick Norton. The show delivers product reviews, computer help, tech tips plus do it yourself projects. The show has everything tech, from iPods to camcorders, HD to the Internet, anything and everything.

I initially was disappointed because this show was replacing one of my old favourites, InDigital. This tainted what I though about it and went into watching the first episode expecting it to suck. Now that I have seen it, I don’t think that it was that InDigital was ending, I don’t think that it was because something was replacing it, it was because I will miss the host I have grown to love over the past two years. I will miss Hahn and Wil.

Anyway, the episode blew me away. I loved it, really loved it. There is not much I can say about this show but you have to check it out. I do believe Revision3 has a winner here and I can’t wait to see it grow as time goes on. I would hope that we do see special guests on the show to make it more lively and interesting, and no, I’m not saying Patrick and Jessica are boring or will become boring, far from it actually.

The first episode was basic. They showed a great review on a video on demand box, they had some great tips on making better looking videos by showing camera techniques, they showed a battery hack to use a big 12 battery to power your handheld devices and they also showed you a nice piece of software for RAM diagnostics. You really have to check out the show yourself to witness how great it is. If I was rating this show, five dragons out of five dragons.

I listen to a few podcasts, about five weekly ones and a daily one. Most of the audio podcasts are done by the TWiT network. I also watch a few video podcasts, ones brought by Revision3. I have been watching and listening to these shows for a couple of years now. In the past years, I have never had to say goodbye to one of these shows that have become a part of my routine, part of my life. On Tuesday, a podcast that I had watched since its third episode, released its final episode ever.

InDigital is a show that looks at and reviews gadgets and products. I loved watching the show, it was very informative and made me want some of the products, and made me not want to even touch others. The hosts were very respected and all round great people. They had three awesome hosts, Hahn Choi, Jessica Corbin and Wil Wheaton, and I am going to miss them heaps.

Losing a show is a hard thing to do. Watching the flashbacks and everything brought tears to one eyes. I was not read to bid farewell to this excellent show. This show definitally got shut down before its time. It still had heaps of potential to grow and it is unfortunate that it wasn’t given a fair chance for survival. Revision3 gave the producer, Hahn, the options of moving the show to San Fransisco or ending it. He choose to end it because he didn’t want to move. I don’t understand why they can’t keep it the same as they had been doing.

Anyway, farewell my friend, I will miss you. Revision3 are replacing the show with something similar which will premiere tomorrow. I don’t know if I will like the show but hopefully it can fill some of the hole that Revision3 left after it pulled InDigital. :’(

Last week, Digg implemented new profiles for users. Things all seemed great despite some of the negative feedback. The site became more social, which I believe was ultimately their goal with the new profiles. Randoms started adding me as friends. I decided to leave them as my fans and not make the relationship mutual for the simple reason that I do not give a shit about them or what they digg on the site.

I had the shouts set so anyone could shout to me. The first should I received was from a friend that added me. At the time, I though he was a random like the twenty or so other people who added me but it turns out, it was somebody I knew from the internet. Thanks to the shout feature, I was able to identify him, and add him to my friends list. Now there is a good use for shouts. My friends had also shouted me an article they submitted and that is fine too, I can help them try and get teir story to the front page, like they have done to my stories in the past. Another good thing I like about shouts.

Yesterday, I finally got a piece of the dark side of shouts, abuse. A random added me and then kept sending shouts every ten minutes to everyone talking telling us to digg the story he submitted. First off, I don’t give a shit about randoms, and secondly, I don’t want to Digg nonsense crap that you submit. Also for the record, if you submit 300 stories to Digg and none of them ever reach the front page, you should just give up because no one cares about the shit you find interesting. Leave Digg and go make love to your WoW girlfriend (who is actually a guy.) Anyway, back on topic. This really annoyed me, especially the email notifications of this spam. I needed a way to shut this thing and prevent him from spamming me.

Trying to shut this guy up was an extremely annoying experience, especially since the ways of preventing him, were too affective and I didn’t want that. The only option I had was to only let my friends shout to me. This may sound like a good idea but I don’t think that I should prevent other people from shouting to me because one douche spams me. There should be a way I can block him so I no longer have to take his spam. Anyway, I did that and 12 hours later I put it back so everyone can shout to me. I haven’t had spam since. I don’t want to miss out on long lost online friends because of some idiot, it’s not fair.

It is a shame that one douchebag, whether it is on Digg, another site, or even in real life can ruin something for everyone. What sucks more is that we can’t do anything about it or we are limited to what we can do to prevent it from affecting us. I simple block would be sufficient but we don’t have the option to do that. Please let me block this person, also if you haven’t already, delete him. No one will miss him and its not like he did much for Digg, only ruin it and piss off some of its users.

Yesterday I managed to make the frontpage of Digg. This is a difficult thing to do in my opinion, although there are people that are naturals and get heaps of stories on the frontpage daily. Anyway, I strategically got a story that was bound to make it to the frontpage to get there before someone else submitted it.

First off, I needed to work out what the reader wanted to see and/or know and find a place that would be able to provide that information. I decided to go with the big topic of Apple’s new iPods, one that is seen on Digg at least 5 times a day. I was going to submit one of those stories!

One thing that hadn’t been done is the dissection of the new iPod Touch. Okay, it may seem like nothing but one question that is on a lot of people’s minds is Bluetooth, is it or is it not in the iPod Touch? The only way this could possibly be answered if in one of two ways, either Apple confirms it, or someone rips apart a unit and discovers a chip for Bluetooth.

I knew where I had to go to find the story. iFixit had recently taken apart the iPod Nano and iPod Classic and I was positive that they were going to do the same to the iPod Touch when they got their dirty hands on it. I frantically waited for signs of them having their way with her, refreshing the page every minute. The iPod was out and they had to have one by now.

After about an hour of refreshing, in fine print down the side of the page was the first sign on life “Check out our first look at the iPod Touch.” I click and saw a bunch of unboxing pictures. When are they going to rip into her? Are they going to? There was no mention on the site about taking it apart, but they had to! I refreshed a couple of times. I went to submit it to Digg, entering in all of the field waiting to submit it. I went back to iFixit. After more minutes of refreshing, finally there as a sign, they were going to take a look inside.

This was when I finally submitted it. I was hoping no one else had submitted it during my period of hesitation. To my luck, I was the only one. My story is bound to be on the frontpage by the time they finished stripping her naked. I get Peppery to digg it, he did as well as twittered it. I submitted it to Pownce, thats where a lot of the Kevin Rose Fanboys… errmm… I mean Diggers hang out.

Every 10 minutes, a picture of the iPod Touch went up, each one more less article of clothing from the last. After two hours, she was completely stripped of her glory and out there for the world to see her bits, every single component, every single chip. Every hour, I got one or two diggs. 6 hours later, my story only has 20 diggs. The problem was the timezone conflicts. I was going to have to wait till the morning to see the progress of my story. I went to sleep. In the morning, I wake up to discover my story hit the frontpage an hour ago. 400 diggs by the time I wake up. Yay! I got there! I win!!!