Truncated RSS feeds — where only an except of a site’s content displays in its feed — are possibly the most annoying thing one can find on a site one wishes to follow. When you’re cruising through your RSS reader, it’s a real pain to see all of the lovely content you subscribe to and then find ten 50 word entries, cut off mid sentence and ending with “CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING”.

I’ve given up reading many great sites because I can’t consume their content how I want to, and that’s sad.

I get why people create truncated RSS feeds; the idea is if you only offer a snippet of content, people who want to subscribe are going to come and visit your site instead. That increases page views, ad impressions, and the site gets to work its magic of hooking one-time viewers into becoming long term, signed up readers.

Trouble is, it doesn’t really work like that. If I grab a site’s RSS feed, it’s because I want to know when said site has new content I can read. If  I like the content, I’ll click through and browse through the comments, perhaps add my own and maybe even tweet it. For me, RSS is a way of putting all the content I might be interested in in a central place, and from there I can find the stuff I’m actually interested in.

I’m still subscribing, and I’ll still visit the site, provided the content is interesting.

Continue reading “Fixing truncated RSS feeds” →

As I write this, sevenironcows is undergoing its very first redesign. Nine months after I launched the site, rocking a purpose built ‘personal’ theme (which I later released as Empty Spaces, a free/pay-what-you-want download), the site is in need of something which better shows off the quantity of content I’ve amassed since the start of the year.

I started redesigning fairly late last night, and went to bed in the early hours thinking I was done. This morning when I booted up my desktop and took a poke around the ‘finished’ design, I decided it wasn’t actually done after all and set to work again.

Continue reading “Addicted to redesign” →

Whilst driving down to Devon with Heather yesterday, we figured as we were going to be driving past Stonehenge, we’d stop for lunch there. It seemed like a good idea.

Sadly, the area around Stonehenge is a terrible, terrible place for traffic, and we spent an hour crawling along the two mile stretch leading up to the World Heritage Site. One does get quite a good view from the road, though!

Continue reading “I went to Stonehenge and all I got was this crappy photo” →

So, one of the things I wanted to do with this blog was write once per week. Dear reader, you may note I’ve not posted anything for the last two weeks, and I’ve thus failed at my valiant aim. Well, kinda. See, I’ve just got back from a lovely fortnight in Switzerland, and whilst they do have internet in Switzerland, sadly there wasn’t any internet I was able to particularly accessibly use, save for the occasional twenty minutes of surfing one got when catching the local cable-car replacement bus service, which conveniently had free wifi.

I’d say that was a fairly reasonable excuse.

Continue reading “Back home; breaking rules” →

I have a confession to make. Hill Climb Racing, that charming little endlessly driving challenge thing game? It’s one of my favourite mobile games.

I originally played Hill Climb ~a year ago on my Touchpad and thoroughly enjoyed it. The challenge of using skill and pushing on further distance-wise to get more currency to upgrade the vehicle versus just upgrading the vehicle and brute-forcing progress — or even saving to unlock new vehicles and tracks made the otherwise simple and straightforward game into something which was difficult to put down.

Just one more go get that bit further! And so on.

Last week I found myself redownloading Hill Climb Racing (iOS link), after recommending it to Ben as a slightly better version of a game Miniclip had just released. And, a year later, this thing is just as good as it was. Skill is almost optional, which makes using it all the more rewarding. The option to make savvy upgrades and purchases, too, emboldens that sense of skill and reward.

Continue reading “Hill Climb Racing for GOTY” →

After announcing to the world last week how excellent I was at writing every day, I’ve not written anything at all this week. I certainly found that little anecdote funny. It’s almost as though by acknowledging the magical writing process, I immediately invalidated it.

What I have been doing this week is re-visiting the somewhat-laboured joy of my Android 4.0-running HP Touchpad, which I picked up nearly two years ago after that time when HP sold off all their Touchpads for not much money that time. I’ve been waiting for the new generation of Nexus 7s to (finally) make an appearance, and I wanted to get re-familiarised with the whole Android tablet experience, and boy it’s good.

I’m a huge fan of two reading apps on my phone: Pocket and Flipboard, and their tablet equivalents are seriously nice. They link together very nicely, creating a very smooth content-browsing and content-consumption experience. Even my mum gets how Flipboard works. If you’ve not checked ’em out, I’d definitely do so.

Pic is from somewhere near Burling Gap, West Sussex, where I went earlier on.

I keep seeing the “don’t break the chain” productivity hack being mentioned again and again as a way of getting things done. The premise is fairly straightforward; to make sure you do a certain thing you want/need to do, you do it every day, keep track of it and don’t break that chain of doing-ness.

I can see it working in some situations, but especially with creative work, there’s dubious value in doing something sub-standard for the sake of it. Do you, for example, absolutely have to do your thing? What if you’re doing something else? Out with friends! It seems to have the potential to dominate other activities.

On those grounds, I would generally never consider taking on such a scheme. Whilst I’ve kinda tried it on a smaller scale before (oh hey, blogging here at least once a week), writing every day? Meeeh. Not really one for me. Routine has a habit of becoming mundane.

Continue reading “Write every day” →

I’m not sure at which point along in the scouting-out-a-new-purchase process that I realised I didn’t need a new laptop, but it’s probably safe to say it was fairly early on.

With University looming in a couple of months, I’d figured taking my desktop there and back every ten weeks was actually going to be a bit much, and I thus definitely needed a laptop. This was a slightly annoying thought process, as when I bought said desktop thirty-odd months back, it’d been in part justified as “I wouldn’t mind taking it to University”.

So I don’t need a laptop. Taking my desktop wouldn’t actually be too much trouble, and my ageing netbook has found a new lease of life running Chrome OS.

Yet, I’m quite likely probably going to get a new laptop anyway.

I’ve decided that my University experience will be incomplete if I’m unable to write essays in the kitchen and be on Skype at the same time. I will have literally no fun unless I’m able to play Super Meat Boy in lectures.

The idea that there’s always room for one more device is one that seemingly everyone is finding increasingly acceptable. Devices like Google Glass and the Pebble watch are solving problems that you didn’t even know you had until someone told you about them.

And, you know what? It kinda sucks. I try to be “minimalist” in how much “stuff” I have, yet I’m quite happy saving my pennies for the latest solution to my only-recently-existing problems. Heck, I’m even writing a blog post about laptops in an attempt to make myself feel better about it.

You’ll have to excuse me now. I’m going to read a physical book. My Kindle’s out of battery, anyway.

I was very excited to find in my inbox last week an invite to an invite to the very interesting new publishing platform from Blogger and Twitter founder Ev Williams, Medium. As applications were invite-only, I hadn’t really been expecting to hear anything, and I only vaguely remember even signing up, but still. An invite’s an invite!

One should note that the invite-only method of lunching a web application never fails to generate a false sense of excitement, superiority and exclusivity in the people granted access, and I thus logged into the exclusive Medium club feeling superior.

Feeling the need to contribute something, last Thursday evening I sat down to write a piece I’ve been wanting to write for about three months;  I had a really good idea for the title and the first line, and sadly I’d never really got further than that. I ended up re-writing the whole thing three times over the course of as many hours, but it’s turned out well in the end. If you’ve got a minute, my first post on Medium is well worth a read: Imagined Communities.

I’m not quite sure what I make of Medium, but it’s certainly interesting, and I’d definitely like to write there a couple more times before figuring out what it is I’m doing and indeed what it is the platform is doing.

One of the interesting things about doing “social marketing” (that’s FancySpeak for marketing through social networks) is that nobody really knows what they’re doing; “tried and tested” is just the stuff you did last month that happened to be more successful than the stuff you did the month before.

Thus, rules and goalposts are constantly changing and as a result, it’s difficult to offer meaningful or consistent measures of how good a job you’re doing and how effective your social strategy is.

With a few of the key statistics — reach and clicks to name two — essentially at the mercy of Facebook, Twitter and whichever other platforms you roll on, big changes in results can often happen through no particular fault of one’s own; it’s more often a case of a job well done being working with the changes to deliver the best results possible rather than straight off doing something different which results in results plummeting.

Continue reading “Rules of Engagement: Finding The Holy Grail of Effective Social Metrics” →