Nothing ground-breaking here, but I wish someone had told me about these things sooner. Maybe these will help some of you out.

• Firefox
  • ctrl+1 . . . ctrl+n will switch to that specific tab.
  • ctrl+t (new tab), ctrl+k (search), ctrl+l (address bar) and ctrl+w (close tab) are also musts.
  • You can add new items to the list of feed handlers (Like this)
  • After Firebug, my favorite extension is Resizable Textarea
• Linux
  • The locate and updatedb commands are very useful. Every mention of “find . -name foo -print” online should also say, “trying locate foo first is usually MUCH faster and easier”. But, no one ever seems to talk about it.
  • Here’s my .vimrc file. Can’t live without it.
  • When running top, shift+> and shift+< are your friends. Also, hitting c is usually the first thing I do.
  • nohup is cool.
  • nmap -sV 127.0.0.1 or netstat -tulpen will show you what’s running on what port.
  • Learn about the load average numbers that you see on the top of top.
  • Java processes can run away with all of your memory. Be careful. Use java -Xms100m -Xmx500m to limit things. The Xms is the start amount, the Xmx is the max amount.
• Tools
  • Munin is a great monitoring/charting tool.
  • Solr is the Lucene based search solution we chose for Feed Each Other. It’s easier to set up than most because it does everything via a simple rest api. (But, this was the reason I had to learn the java memory limit trick above.)

Any other tips I should know about? Please share.

It’s not the writing of the code. It’s not the fetching and parsing of the feeds. It’s not dealing with daylight savings time and encoding issues. It’s not any of that.

It’s because you’re always sitting in front of an abundance of interesting things to read. Every time you try to test the latest feature, an interesting headline flies in front of your face. And, more often than not, you manage to convince yourself that it’s “industry related and still counts as work”. Half an hour later, you get back to your code, change a few lines, reload the page, and bam, another interesting blog post catches your eye.

The damn thing just works too well. :)

I’ve recently begun dvr’ing the weekly Prime Minister Q&A session at the British House of Commons. If you don’t watch it, it’s a half hour long and it’s on CSPAN Wed. mornings at 7am (thus the need for the dvr’ing). I highly recommend it to anyone that either loves politics or enjoys watching skilled trash talkers go at each other in front of a rowdy crowd.

Here’s a particularly biting clip from last week:

America would be a better place if our president were subjected to such scrutiny on a weekly basis.

And, have you ever watched the House or Senate on TV? It’s like the turnout at a college fencing match. Everyone has better things to do. At the very least, the prospect of seeing the Prime Minister talk some trash seems to get butts in the seats. The same thing might get everyone together now and then in our Congress too.

Google Reader recently made the number of subscribers of each feed available to anyone doing a feed search. The results are very interesting.

First I’d like to point out that the people that are going around trying to frantically put together leaderboards (like Techcrunch) are wasting their time. The numbers for certain feeds are highly inflated because Google has included them in their feed bundles that are offered when you click “browse” in the “Add Subscription” area. These preselected groups of feeds are also presented to people trying out Google Reader for the first time. As a result, most Google Reader users will have added 1 or more of these bundles, and many, many people that tried Google Reader once and never went back will have these feeds sitting idle in their list. This makes any leaderboard you come up with unfair and uninteresting. [#1]

However, if we can agree that a significant portion of GR users have added the news and tech bundles, then the number of subscribers of the top feeds will approximate the total number of people that have signed up for GR. The BBC news feed has about 200,000 subscribers and sits at or close to the top of the list. I think we can safely infer that the number of total GR users (all time, including inactive members) is somewhere in the ballpark of this number.

That number is TINY. GR has less than a half a million registered users? With Google behind it? GR is definitely today’s most popular feed reader, so this means that the number of people using a feed reader every day is really still quite small.

Clearly feed reading is still in its infancy.

I say infancy because I think that anyone that’s ever used a reader regularly will agree that it’s really, really, really useful. It’s something you try out and can never go back. It’s a paradigm shift. Something this useful is destined to expand its audience.

As a person that just launched his own feed reader, I take the fact that the field is still immature to be great news. It means there’s room for more players. This is something I’ve suspected for quite some time and it’s part of the reason that I started Feed Each Other.

Another thing that confirms my suspicion is something that one of the Google Reader team members said in that leaked video not too long ago. He said something along the lines of “as our user base grows, bloglines isn’t really losing much traffic. We’re not stealing users from them, but we’re getting people that are new to the game“. The potential audience for feed reading is massive. Anyone can benefit from this technology, young and old. Hundreds of millions of people. We’re just getting started, and I think people are ready for this. It’s the right time.

Whoever creates a feed reader that is fun, easy to use and easy to understand for regular folks is going to be very successful. Obviously, I think Feed Each Other is that reader.

Notes:

#1 - The ‘popular feeds’ list on Feed Each Other only takes into account subscriptions that have been recently active for just this reason.

Valleywag just wrote about something that’s been bothering me for a few weeks now.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smellypoop.com%2Fpoop.html&ei=7xAM
R62WC5mIhAPn3I0w&usg=AFQjCNFsw83KR3JmGnnBi_n89GtI
dgWgFw&sig2=Th-qrd3nEEx_368yjwK7cA

Google has stopped linking directly to sites in their main search results and is instead passing each url through a really long, gnarly redirect. This is something Yahoo! has been doing for a long time and it’s pretty lame. You can’t cut and paste links out of the search results any more, and it takes longer to get where you want to go because you have to go through a middleman. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s really annoying. I’ve always believed that the lack of such redirects was a big reason why Google always maintained a lead over Yahoo! in the search wars.

What’s the point of these redirects? They’re there so that Google/Yahoo can accurately track clicks on their search results pages. I previously assumed that Google, because they weren’t beholden to archaic link tracking methodologies like Yahoo!, was using javascript click handlers and ajax to do the tracking behind the scenes. I guess I overestimated them.

This is a bad, bad sign for Google. It means they are, perhaps for the first time, willing to sacrifice the quality of the user experience in order to feed more data to the reports read by upper management. Google wins here (short term), but the user loses. It’s very un-dude.

A change like this could only be made to their #1 money-maker if their fantastic culture and spirit is eroding and giving way to typical big company BS. It means that some VP managed to put his short term goals ahead of the company’s long term success. Perhaps they’ve let too many Paul Buchheit’s get away and hired ladder climbers in their place.

If I owned any Google stock, I’d sell it soon (although, to be fair, I’ve said that a few times before and I’ve been wrong every time).