And so it begins: 136 feeds slashed to 99, 54 follows tumbles to 26. Perhaps it had something to do with me being in a quaint little town in central Utah earlier this evening to realize one huge thing that has been really frustrating me lately: I am on information overload, and it is driving me crazy. So it was that after a good chat with my wife on the way home tonight that I decided I was going to clean house a little.

Step 1: Take my feeds to the pool

My Google Reader subscriptions have been getting a bit out of control as of late. You may remember a while back when I posted about how I “stay in touch” with technology and the outside world through the use of feeds. Problem was, I got into a terrible habit of subscribing to a feed simply because I liked one or two posts from the site/blog. Just mere weeks ago, I had 96 subscriptions (I’m sure many of you rolled your eyes at that), but this evening I checked to find I had 136! That was just ridiculously out of control. I’ve been noticing that it has been taking upwards of a full hour each day (or more for some days) to get through all the news items that came through the feeds.

So, needless to say, Reader got a bit of a trim tonight. I carved a full 37 feeds from the routine. There were a few feeds in particular that will make the daily reading much easier. KSL.com was providing an average of 30.1 stories per day. The next highest per-day-amount was from Major League Soccer News at about 12 per day. I chopped both of those right off, as well as all but two soccer feeds: Soccer by Ives and Behind the Shield. I then went through all my tags and cleaned house. I had previously subscribed to a bunch of the google blogs about Ad Sense and Webmaster Tools, but realized that when those posts came through I was completely skipping them because I just wasn’t interested. That was really the crux of the situation: I had subscribed to an enormous amount of blogs assuming that I even cared about what they had to say, or perhaps that I should care about it. The fact of the matter came down that I just didn’t care, or didn’t have the time to care. And as we all know, time is money. CHOP.

By the way, I can’t tell you how liberating it feels to have sliced so much out. I’ll report soon on what I find based on the surgery.

Step 2: Noise-cancellation

A few months back I decided I would finally give Twitter a try (this came on the heels of finally giving in to facebook last year, just to see what all the fuss was about (FYI: it’s about nothing at all)). For those of you who have no idea what Twitter is, here is their one liner:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

It sounds conspicuously similar to facebook or myspace, and while it does have the flavor of social networking, it’s far simpler. The only thing you can really do on twitter is just that: tell people what you are doing. What’s more, you only have 140 characters to relate your sordid tale, even if you have links or pictures to share. There are link shortening services that help with this, but still, short and sweet is the Twitter mantra. Now, this all seems like a bash on Twitter, but I must admit that it absolutely can serve an enormous purpose for people trying to have their company or product go viral. Just go ask Amazon, or Jet Blue. They’ve had customer service nightmares blow up in their faces from Tweeters that send a maelstrom of angry one-liners at the companies for minor slip-ups. To put it bluntly, Twitter provides power to the people.

As you can tell, I’ve been studying Twitter as much as I can lately. As such, I’ve discovered quite a few people/companies to that I am interested in to follow. People like Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office), Imogen Heap, Real Salt Lake, and common squirrel (my personal favorite). Over the last week or two I’ve been following 54 tweeps (like peeps, but not) and one thing I’ve realized. Just because someone is a supposed expert in their field does not mean they are interesting enough to hear about all the minutia they come up with each day to enchant their followers. My experience with following people that I don’t know on Twitter (no matter how high of regard I had for them before) is pretty much an enormous waste of time. People like Jeffrey Zeldman (Design Guru), or Alex Smith (Twitter API Lead), among others. Love the work they do, but I just don’t know them well enough (read: at all) to really have any point in knowing that they had a jamocha milkshake and that they think that the local diner is weird for serving potato lasagna.

So it was with un-heavy heart that I chopped the majority of my followings from 54 down to 26. The majority of the people I still follow are friends, with the occasional company or sport tweeter. Interestingly enough, I find that Twitter is a much better outlet to getting quick news info than RSS. With a strict requirement to limit each tweet to 140 characters, you’ve got to be short and sweet, and to the point.

Step 3: Breathe the fresh(er) air

While the purging and slashing I did tonight on my tech info overload was significant, I’m sure there will be room for improvement and more slashing in the coming weeks. What’s important is that I realized what was going wrong and took the steps necessary to begin changing it. I’ll still have to work on suppressing the urge to subscribe to new blogs, doing so only when I am certain the content is worth the amount of time it takes to consume it. The Twitter bug won’t be as hard to shake, as I’m still forming those habits and ways to deal with them as we speak.

What are you doing to purge and/or simplify in your life?

Just passing word along that I’m on a brief post-writing hiatus due to a big project at work we’re trying to close out. No, that doesn’t mean I write my posts while at work (at least, not all of them), but means that I’m so burned out by the end of the night from having worked 10 or 12 hours that I have no desire to use the computer at all.

Our regularly scheduled program will return shortly, but in the meantime, have a cocktail and enjoy this random video I just dug up for you… going to youtube to find something random

‘nuff said.

I just came across this amazing video of how soccer unites people around the world. It’s a bit long, but it has absolutely been the highlight of my day.

The Soccer Project from Rebekah Fergusson on Vimeo.

Did it make me shed a tear? Maybe.

UPDATE: I got Pelada (the name of the documentary) for Christmas in 2010 and it is EXCELLENT. Go buy it today.

Rarely a day goes by where I do not think about or act on my business ideas. Most of the actions/thoughts are centered around formulating a system or product that will create an Automated Income Stream, or pave the way to such opportunities. Every so often I’ll break from the norm and formulate ideas about business philosophies in general, how would I set things up in certain circumstances.

So it was that this past friday I was out to lunch with some developer friends from work and we got to talking about our current work load. One friend mentioned how he was tired of doing overtime (we’ve been ultra-slammed with a large project for the past 8 months) and had made a commitment to “only work one or two overtime’s per week from now on”. I rather rudely laughed in his face. Had I been drinking something, it would have been sprayed all over the backseat of the car. It should be noted now, that I have a highly disgusted opinion of that little thing that business owners love to promote: Overtime.

Mandated Overtime should be illegal.

I don’t know who would enforce that law, maybe some employee police who show up at business places after hours looking for people who were “asked” to “put in a few extra hours this week” because of a “big deadline coming up” for “client x”. Punishment for violation of this law would be placed on the business owner or manager enforcing the overtime work, punishable by revoking that person’s managerial duties for a certain amount of time (determined upon severity of the given offense). Managers with company ownership would be required to divvy up their share of the company with all harmed workers (those doing the overtime). Ya, maybe that’s how I’d do it.

Okay, but seriously, it should absolutely be illegal. It is my opinion that the business owner or manager who “asks” or “requests” overtime from a peer employee has a misplaced perception of reality, one in which their employee has lesser rights or privileges than that of their own. They think that the employee should do so for “the good of the company”, and too often, the employees buy it. “You see, we’ve got this really really big project that is coming down the wire, and we just can’t miss.” I don’t buy it. I strongly believe that Mandated (requested or required) Overtime is a sign that your boss or employer doesn’t understand a few important things about business and life in general. I present here two questions that owners/managers should consider when thinking about mandating overtime.

1. Is the employee a person? I’m serious about this one. I truly believe that some managers don’t really see their employees as people, just drones to carry on a task and get paid for it (which means they are also an expense and a liability). Seriously, employees are people to. They have friends, family, and separate lives from work. Let them maintain those other relationships, rather than letting them crumble due to workplace stress and time away from home. The answer is that, Yes, employees are people.
2. Does the employee want to work Overtime? Now, 99% of all employees “asked” to do overtime will say yes. When asked if they “really” want to do overtime, most will say, “sure, it’s no problem.” That’s because most people are too afraid to say No, fearing that (in a down economy) they will be looked down upon by their employer and could possibly be jeopardizing their jobs by appearing not to be a “team player”. The answer to this point, No, your employee does not want to work overtime, whatever they may say to the contrary.

So what’s this really about? Why am I making such a fuss over Overtime? It’s like I said before: Overtime represents a flawed perception of reality. So, let’s stomp it out. What does overtime really mean? In one definition, Overtime means that there is more work (sometimes far more) than we have the ability to do during normal work hours, or throughout a carefully planned project schedule. This usually means one of two things:

1. Whoever signed off on the project did not understand the amount of work required to get it done.
2. Whoever signed off on the project understood the amount of work required, but signed the deal anyways, knowingly committing to more work than the company or team was capable of performing.

In either case, the problem is that the project was over-sold, and will likely under-deliver, though at great cost to those involved in doing the work. In one case, it is Ignorance; in the other, Indifference. Often times it’s a mixture of both that get them in trouble. I’ve heard CEO’s and managers talk about how “Project X will make or break this company. We deliver on this one, and none of us will have to work again in our lives, unless we want to. Sure it will be hard, but that’s how it’s supposed to be, and it’ll be worth it. By the way, if we fail, we’ll all need to go find new jobs.” In short, Overtime is simply the result of someone making a deal that they probably know will be too much for the team to handle, but is too lucrative in some way to pass up. So how do you avoid the Overtime trap?

First: STOP SELLING VAPORWARE.

Stop selling something you don’t have. Stop promising to that client that you have this ultra cool widget that whistles like a monkey and dances like a ballerina. All of your employees know that the widget actually honks like a goose and trips down the stairs, or worse, that there is no such widget at all. If they knew what you were promising, 90% of them would be on Monster before you could count to five, and you might get a few that will up and walk out on you. 

Second: Stop trying to be something you’re not.

You are an orange, not an apple. If Client X wants an apple, they certainly won’t get one by biting into your orange. So stop pretending to be something that you aren’t. Instead, focus on the truly novel concept of doing and being what you are. You will likely find that there is a viable market for oranges that you can build into and be just as happy. Oh, and you have the added benefit that your employees will absolutely love you for this. 

Third: Turn Demand into a path to success, not a death march.

Don’t have a rotary-girder, but Client X really really wants one? Tell them the truth. Then, when you get back from the meeting, talk to your top people and figure out if building that rotary-girder would be a viable arm to grow into for the business. If one client wants it, are there others that would be looking for the same thing? How long would it take to put together? If this client were gone when you actually created the rotary-girder, would it have been a waste of resources, or would there be other opportunities available? If this new path is viable (and doesn’t stray too far from the focus of what you do best), then go for it. But by all means, do it right. Do your homework, plan it out, create a sensible approach to creating the product or service, and then execute with your team. But by all means, do not agree to building the product or service if you don’t have it. Build it first, then sell it to your hearts content.

The moral of this long-ish story? Mandated Overtime is something that should be avoided like the plague, as it is an indicator of something far scarier about your business: you are creating an unsustainable environment for your employees. So reel it in, stop the Overtime, scale back your ambitious selling that is putting all your employee’s that much further from their spouses. Go back to your initial focus that made you successful in the first place. Your employees will be more loyal, and you won’t have to give up parts of your company because the overtime police came calling at 10 o’clock at night to find your senior developer chest deep in production system compile errors.

Just over two months ago I made a promise to you. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s probably good and bad. The promise I made at the end of the article Turning off the Corporate Cruise-Control was that I would within a day or two provide a followup post detailing actions one could take with the knowledge. I have since utterly broken this promise for which I profusely apologize. As promised, I’m continuing the thread where I pointed out the obvious benefits that can come from building an Automated Income Stream, or simply, AIS.

This time around I’d like to focus mainly on what it takes to create one or more AIS’s. Ultimately, the desire and determination will have to come from within you, it’s not something I can provide for you. If you’ve read the previous post and agree with even half of what I said in it, then continue reading. If not, I truly hope that you can achieve your life goals by working for someone else, though I have found it difficult to do so. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and neither is the corporate 8-to-5 model. Let us carry on.

Have you ever had that spark? I know that you have. It’s an experience I’m convinced everyone has had (likely) many many times during their lives. I’m talking about the time when you were minding your own business when “out of the blue” an idea came to you that was so absurdly amazing that you stopped everything you were doing just to think about it. Depending on how consumed you were with whatever it was you were doing, you spent anywhere from 15 seconds to several hours thinking about this idea. Sometimes, the idea was so good you talked about it to friends or colleagues. You might have written about it in your journal or blog, or perhaps kept it in the back of your mind for another time that was more appropriate to explore and/or act upon your initial thoughts.

You can call this process of discovery whatever you want, dumb luck, happenstance, Inspiration & Insight (wink), revelation, etc. Regardless of what you call it (though I would have to argue that it is not happenstance or dumb luck), it is Powerful. I’m sure that many people have these “Aha! moments” and simply let them slide by, or keep them around just to keep conversation. Assuming you are an entrepreneur or would like to be, DON’T let them go by! Write down your inspirations as they come. Keep a notebook or similar on you at all times, ready to take this inspiration as it comes. Write and do not edit. A sheer brain dump will always be more powerful than if you stop and think. Go on autopilot for this.

Lately, I have had a very specific biological clock regarding when my inspirations come. I either receive amazing inspirational ideas in the dead of night (generally from 1 to 4), or while showering in the morning before heading to punch the clock. My two most-recent examples:

1. Typical Programmer

For nearly a year I’ve had a specific idea kicking around in my head about a certain business product I would love to find or build. The initial idea was fairly ambiguous in nature, not like the sudden inspiration we’re talking about here. For several months I would think of it randomly, without much inspiration surrounding it. Then one night a few months ago I woke up at 3:30, the idea had finally reached inspiration status. At first I mulled the new concepts over in my mind hoping to go back to sleep and I could think about it in the morning. This was obviously not working by 4, so I decided to do something about it. I popped open my laptop, sat up in bed, and went to work. By the time I needed to start getting ready for work, I had a fairly good working copy of the application in Rails. I hadn’t dealt with specifics like design or branding, but just focused on building some of the core features that had come during the night. Since that time the idea has again taken a back-burner role while I sniff out some potentialities regarding some of the more high-level features. Even then, I have a fairly solid base to work from when I decide the time is right to come back and work on it. Lesson learned: you can get an incredible amount of work done in the middle of the night because there are zero distractions.

2. Singing in the Rain, er, Shower.

I take really long showers. Like, 30 or 40 minutes sometimes. Ok, so lately they’re usually more like 15 minutes, but still, I love hot water. The funny part is that I basically just stand there under the water the entire time, washing my hair only when I’m ready to get out. Weird quirks aside, I’ve noticed that I get quite a lot of inspiration just standing and not really thinking about much at all. It gives my mind time to wander and think about random things, rather than when I’m at work or with my wife and kids where I have to keep up some level of logical thought and concentration. So it was about a month ago when I was taking a shower, thinking about something random when the inspiration struck. For the past 9 months since the iPhone SDK has been out and available to developers, I’ve always wanted to come up with some app ideas to build and sell through the App Store. Up until this particular day, I had basically come up with a lot of really lame ideas that would be so wildly unpopular apple would surely send its thugs to break my fingers to prevent me from ever writing a line of code again. Then the inspiration came, and within a 10 minutes shower I had well over 20 new app ideas that were absolutely feasible, dare I say profitable. When I got out of the shower I immediately wrote down the bare minimum for each idea that came, then throughout the next few days gathered feedback from developers and colleagues alike regarding supposed feasibility of the apps. Since that time I have steadily been growing my knowledge of Objective-C and the iPhone SDK (many thanks be to Jason Barker on this), as well as lining up business contracts to make this a viable income stream. Lesson learned: don’t give up if the ideas don’t seem to be coming. One day they will flood you out if you are looking for it.

I was hoping to be able to contain this into a single post, but it is clear to me that I can write pages and pages about creating income streams and entrepreneurialism in general. So, I will let your eyes rest for now, and promise that a new post will come soon with more good things. I part with a query from Ryan Byrd, leave your comment below:

What are you doing today to break free?

This is too funny for a description. It gets good about half way through. Kudos to Chad for pointing this out to me.

My Personal Favorite is the Haiku-Compliant markup. :)

A recent post by my friend Rainer prompted me to realize that while I have been fairly active throughout my life, I’ve also been a bit clumsy at times. I pride myself in the amount of physical activity I subscribe to each day*, but it hasn’t come without a price. Off the top of my head I’ve broken 6 bones in my trials and tribulations. I’m pretty sure there’s a few more, but that’s what I got for you at this point. So without further ado, I will give you a short rundown on each of these breaker stories, ordered from least impressive to most impressive.

Minding My Own Business.

I used to love to go skating at an indoor park called the Proving Grounds in Pleasant Grove. They had some majorly fun ramps and rails to skate, and while I’ve never been an incredible skater, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed rolling around, popping some ollies, and sliding rails. One evening I was skating at the PG in PG (hehe), I was practicing some flat-ground kickflips. While concentrating on my feet setup on my own board I suddenly collided with another skater who was coming the opposite direction. We both were thrown off our boards and onto our backs. In the foray, my right arm did a massive windmill and slammed into the concrete, breaking the fifth metacarpal joint on my right hand (the joint joining my palm with my pinky finger). I didn’t think it was broken right away, but it hurt enough that I immediately went home. By the time I got there, we decided to go in to the ER and get it checked, and voila! The pathetic thing is that the break was like this miniscule piece of bone that was chipped off the outside of the joint, but it felt like the whole joint was fractured. Yes I know, I am a wuss.

Obviously not ready for the Majors.

Most who know me know that I LOVE playing soccer. I’ve played on various indoor teams over the past few years down at the Indoor Soccer field in Lindon. A few years ago I was playing goalie for our team since we were short handed (I don’t regularly play goalie because, well, I’m not very good at it at all). We were getting pounded by the opposite team, mainly because they had a bunch of super good players with cannon’s for legs. Nearing the end of the game a shot was blasted my way that I successfully parried away with both hands, but the brunt of the shot was taken by my left pinky which subsequently decided to alter it’s angle by about 10 degrees. OUCH. While I didn’t go to the ER for this one, but it hurt like crazy for weeks and has eventually settled in to a nice skewed angle on my hand. Oh, and for the record, I stopped playing goalie after that. :)

Not as strong as I once was (or bright).

In 2003, while Tyler and I were working on marketing our infant business eveRide, we decided to put on a rail competition. The problem was, we didn’t own a comp-worthy rail, so we decided to build one. A trip to Metal Mart and a few hundred bucks later, we had an impressive bulk of Steel tubing at our disposal. The rail we built was an A-Frame, that started at ground level and angled up to about 5 feet high, then 20 feet of flat rail, then angling back down to ground level. We built the rail in 4 sections (up, flat, flat, down) which would allow us to transport the 40 foot behemoth to the comp site. While grinding a weld on one of the flat sections (a 10 foot long bar, with two legs and no feet (yet)), the rail lost support and started to fall. I was closest and knew the fall would be deafeningly loud, so I rushed forward to catch the enormous section, realized at the last moment that it was a completely futile attempt and tried to jump away. The rail came slamming down on my grandpa-style-slipper-clad left foot, breaking the tip of my second toe. I’m pretty sure I lost an enormous amount of religion that night, but I’m not sure you would’ve done otherwise, so stop judging me. :) To this day, the tip of that toe is much more plump and skewed than all the others. Again, no ER visit on this one.

Dude, we JUST got here!

December 26th, 2001. Kevin and I decided to use our Canyon’s Season Passes to go ride on a frigid wednesday following Christmas. We took one trip up the short lift to go ride the rails and boxes. The first rail was a low mailbox style rail that we both tried a few times, taking our boards off and hiking the rail after each attempt. I think I did it Twice. As I recall, we hadn’t even ridden the rest of the park at all yet. Kevin slid the rail a 3rd time, then took of his board to hike again. It was my turn to go, so I rode into a boardslide. At the end of the rail I had a brain fart and forgot to turn back, landed facing down the hill, and caught my front edge on the icy snow, catapulting me directly onto my left collar bone (on the ice no less). I knew immediately it was broken, but kevin had already hiked the rail again and was out of earshot, so I had to wait for him to get into his bindings, wait his turn (it was very busy), slide the rail, then stop next to me lying on the ground seething with pain. I didn’t know what to do but ride the rest of the run, so that we did, I booked the entire thing, each bump throbbing into my collar bone, sending pain EVERYWHERE. The med station was at the bottom of the run and I remember collapsing outside of it, still strapped in. They took the X-Ray there, confirming a break, and then released me with a sling to go home a mere 40 minutes after we had gotten to the resort. 

Don’t you just love Cats?

Late one evening last June I was having a leisurely ride down by Utah Lake with Tyler after dusk. We had ridden down to the Lindon Boat Harbor and were on our way back on a backroad. I had recently been riding my brother’s road bike to work (with the fancy clip pedals), so I was again riding it that night. I was slightly parched, so I grabbed my water bottle and started drinking out of it. To my surprise, just ahead of me on the road is a dead cat, lying directly in my path. With hampered maneuvering skills (one-handed due to drinking the bottle), I decided in a split second the best option is to run over the cat and see what happens. After the minor “speedbump” (which was quite a bit harder than I expected), I started to lose my balance to the left, veering towards the unsuspecting Tyler (who was slightly ahead of me). My front wheel collided into the side of his back wheel, which brought me down immediately onto the pavement of the road and my left elbow. In the crash, My right foot came loose of the pedal, but the left was still locked in, and I could not get it out. This was slightly alarming because I had crashed in the middle of the deserted road, but a car was coming in the oncoming lane, meaning I had to Frankenstein-drag myself and attached bike off to the left shoulder of the road. By this time, Tyler had stopped and was trying to figure out just what had happened. After losing a bit more Religion, I was able to get out of the bike and walk it off a bit. With two miles to go till home, and no cell phones on either of us, the only option we had was to finish the ride, which was surprisingly calm, albeit one-handed. By the time I got home, there was no question in my mind that it was broken. ER, here we come. I still have a small limitation in how my left arm rotates around the Radius bone.

The Pièce de résistance: Hardheaded.

February 12th, 2001. Another Snowboarding trip gone awry, this time while en route to the resort. I drove with my brother Scott up to pick up some friends who lived in Provo Canyon, then started driving to Park City through the canyon. The morning was sleeting pretty bad, and the roads were very sketchy. I was afraid of driving in my ‘89 Jeep Wrangler, so I pulled over and asked Scott to drive. He had no qualms about the bad roads, so away we went. Not more than two minutes later, while turning a large bend in the road at Vivian Park, the Jeep lost all traction and slid out of the turn and off the road towards a small group of homes near the park. Both wheels on the right side of the jeep (where I was sitting) tilted off of a 10 foot retaining wall separating the road level from the backyard of one of the homes. We rode that wall for nearly 30 feet before rolling over the rest of the wall, landing on the rollbar on my side of the Jeep, then completing the barrell roll by landing back on our wheels.

The last thing I remembered was the car sliding off the road, grabbing the door with my right hand, and the Jeep tilting to the right (the wheels going off the side). Everything else was black until I woke up in the Ambulance, answering questions about who the President of the US was. Apparently, Scott was unhurt (luckily we were both wearing our seat belts), and I apparently was not unconscious by the time we were back on our wheels. I was told I attempted to unbuckle my seat belt, then collapsed into seizures. Scott had already exited the Jeep and was running to the house to get help. A nice couple behind us stopped to help out, and the woman supposedly held me in my seizures until the Ambulance arrived. Apparently, in the rollover, the rollbar above my head broke completely free and knocked me on the upper left side of my skull, knocking in a piece of bone about the size of a dime.

Scott was sobbing in the Ambulance, and I remember being really annoyed at the guy asking me all the questions (assessing my brain functionality and comprehension), as I had enormous pain in my body, as well as the uncontrollable urge to vomit. I remember arriving at the hospital, being taken out of the ambulance on the stretcher, and immediately seeing my parents there, both crying. Remembering that single image is enough to still bring tears back, I just remember how scared my mom looked. Amazingly, I was in the hospital only 12 hours, from 8 am to 8 pm. They didn’t perform any surgery, just closed my head wound with stitches since it was small enough to heal on its own. I do remember seeing my then-girlfriend, Alice, visiting me, as well as Tyler and Kevin trying their best not to laugh, but doing a terrible job at it. I recall playing Tony Hawk on the Playstation that night, though sleeping was absolutely miserable for the next several days.

Thanks for sticking with me through this monster of a post, hope it brought some good laughs. If you’re still reading this, throw a comment and tell me:

What Bones have you broken, and how?

Though I work at a desk job and have absolutely been a slug for the past 4 months… ugh.

I think it’s safe to assume that Blogs are here to stay. There, I said it. Was that so hard? No, not really. With this (semi-)new-fangled trend going on, you can think of pretty much anything and everything you’ve ever dreamed about, and there is somebody out there blogging about it. Probably passionately (and often times using Blogger no less, shudder). With all of this available information out there, I submit the question:

How do you keep track of it all?

For myself, I definitely don’t follow every blog I hear about or find. I’m semi-choosy. I’m definitely a big fan of RSS feeds, I’ve been using them probably since 2003. (For those who are lost at this point, the quick definition of RSS Feeds: An auto-updated subscription file available on blogs, news sites, etc, that allows you to get the recently posted topics from those sites. Certain programs can read these feeds and display them in a human-friendly format. It’s kinda like personalized email, but without the use of emails. :)).

Not until recently did I finally come up with a system that I feel works well for me. Up until a few weeks ago I have been using Apple’s Mail.app to manage/read my RSS feeds from all my blogs. Unfortunately, it’s a fairly new feature in Mail.app (came with Leopard) and in my opinion is lacking in a lot of areas, especially when you have a lot of feeds. Needless to say, it got burdensome in the end trying to manage it all through Mail.

Enter Google Reader.

As you can see, I’m quite a read-a-holic. I have 96 RSS subscriptions (blogs or otherwise) that I follow on a regular basis. I’ve “read” 1,732 iteams in the last 30 days of using Google Reader (which I believe is about as long as I ‘ve been using it). While that seems like an incredible amount of articles to read, I honestly browse probably 70% of the posts, skim 25%, and read probably 5% of the posts in their entirety (thanks Ben for showing me my bad math on this).  Though this seems like a waste of time, it’s very useful to me to get the information I’m looking for in a quick way. I can check the posts at any time of day in ONE PLACE (rather than visiting a huge list of blogs or other sites and having to scroll down the post lists). It’s much more convenient. Also, if I’ve subscribed to a site and tend to skip most of their posts over a period of a few days, I’ll usually unsubscribe to keep my feed-bloat to a minimum.

So what exactly am I following? I would say the majority of my subscriptions are programming related, especially relating to Ruby/Rails or Objective-C/iPhone programming. I also have all my friend’s & family’s blogs on there, as well as a few soccer news feeds (ESPN and Fox soccernet). A few of my favorite feeds you ask? Here is a short list, in no particular order (I’m sure I’ll forget a few):

• xkcd.com - (COMEDY) - absolutely hilarious comic strip for the nerd in all of us.
• MacRumors.com - (TECH) - A pretty good Apple rumor site, one reason why most of you think I know a lot about Apple (which I do, btw………:)).
• CocoaWithLove.com - (PROGRAMMING) - A really great site for learning some of the more complex pieces of Objective-C and Cocoa development.
• RyanByrd.net - (ANYTHING & EVERYTHING) - Prominent blogger Ryan Byrd and his daily ramblings. You’ll find everything from chemistry expiriments to stories about shooting old T.V.’s at night in the desert (with an ENORMOUS gun).
• 37Signals.com - (TECH/DESIGN) - Everything from Programming, Design, Usability, and just plain ninja-awesomeness.
• Real Salt Lake Blog - (SOCCER) - The RSL team blog, written by employees of the RSL organization.
• KSL.com - (NEWS) - KSL top stories.
• Ron Paul - (POLITICAL) - Campaign4Libery.com, Ron Paul’s online political community.

So, to end this post, I ask you to comment on a few questions:

• How do you keep track of blogs/sites you are interested in?
• How do you get to my blog in particular? Links from other blogs? Email updates? RSS?

The comment box is below…… you know what do to.

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