RobiNZ CAD Blog

Thoughts on the demise of Google Reader

Google are killing Reader, their RSS feed aggregator:

Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning

“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.”

Who cares about RSS? I do!

Google cite declining Reader use and I wonder if Twitter and Facebook have killed RSS? While I use both, tolerating Facebook and loving Twitter, I still use RSS in the way I used to use newspapers!

I don’t read all the content of all 1200+ feeds I subscribe to but use them to get information about a subject when I need it.

Today the Formula 1 season begins so I’ll review the bunch of Formula 1 site feeds I follow for the the first time in months. I was a work when Samsung launched the Galaxy S4 but reviewing my mobile IT feeds is the most efficient way to catch up with that.

While Twitter can tell you a post is there and is awesome for near live interaction there is no way it can compete with RSS as a knowledge aggregator. Tweets just disappear too fast. Facebook only tells you what others are interested in via a crappy web interface!

Looking for an Alternative?

Although I had imported my feeds into Google Reader — primarily for travel access — on the PC I use an off-line reader. The demise of Google’s Reader doesn’t really worry me but I am looking for an alternative to RSS Bandit.

It began as a .net demo project from some Microsoft Employees and was then made open source. Development has stalled — last updated in 2009 — so I’m on the search for a good Windows 7 (work), 8 (home) and Phone RSS reader. Ironic that I was seriously considering converting to full on use of Google Reader!

I was hoping to find a good Windows 8 Modern reader but the few that I’ve tried haven’t impressed. Many, like iPhone/iPad, apps rely on Google Reader API and just present the info it provides or they just collapse in a heap when my 1200+ feeds are imported.

Feedburner lives… on death-watch?

I was somewhat surprised this Google ‘spring clean’ spared the Feedburner feed service. I’m glad as my own TypePad feeds use FeedBurner for a few reasons:

• It detached the feed from the blog platform. The prime reason for that is you could change platforms without requiring readers to re-subscribe. Ironic I am still very happy with TypePad and FeedBurner is the service in doubt!
• It added useful extras like serving the post headlines and excerpts which are seen on my index page.
• It also provided feed use stats, of dubious value recently, which TypePad does not report at all.

FeedBurner was a great company, innovative and responsive to user feedback. Then Google took over and I thought it would develop further. How wrong that was! Apart from porting the reporting to their ‘Google Analytics look’ Google have pretty much ignored it since acquisition.

I regard FeedBurner as being on death-watch as Google have killed their FeedBurner blog, Twitter account and Adsense for [RSS] Feeds. Seems like RSS is dead for Google. FeedBurner has also become unreliable with quite frequent ‘0 report days’ Google don’t seem to give a damn about fixing.

Reader goes, readers gone?

One thing the demise of Reader may reveal is the worth of Google’s feed statistics. According to Feedburner the vast majority of my 9000’ish feed ‘subscriptions’ are from Google Feedfetcher.

I have often wondered about the validity of this number, even tested it. When Reader goes will they disappear too?

* Google Feedfetcher: Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle.

NeatStreets + Smartphone = Smarter Safer Neighbourhood

I’ve been using this app for a while and find it really does help get things done. NeatStreets combines smartphone geo-location, photos and social reporting to make it really easy to report community hazards. Categories include Litter, Graffiti, Flood Damage, Footpath, Parking, Potholes, Signage, Traffic & Street Lights, Trolleys & more.

For example: I noticed the summer heat had caused this bike path near my place to expand, crack & raise up. It is now about 100mm high and could be quite a hazard.

On the phone fire up NeatStreets, take a photo, geo-location pinpoints the spot (near enough or drag the pin on the map to refine), pick the type of report, add a bit of descriptive text, Send. All that takes a minute or two at most.

NeatStreets direct the report to the correct authority/organisation for the location & type of report. The recipients like it as get a detailed report, to send the correct response, and often have the NeatStreets response automated as part of their own incident management system.

You can see the reply and report status (fixed/not) on your phone or the NeatStreets website.

Reported, Sorted!

NeatStreets Australia and New Zealand

You can use it to report local defects in your neighbourhood - anything from broken footpaths and faulty streetlights to abandoned shopping trolleys. The service automatically keeps you informed of progress until the issue gets fixed.

The app is free for iPhone, Android, and WindowsPhone7/8 users.

Your reports will also be accessible at:

• NeatStreets(AU) - www.neatstreets.com.au
• NeatStreets(NZ) - www.neatstreets.co.nz

UPDATE 2013-02-02: I contacted NeatStreets as noticed a minor typo in their “Tell a friend” message which will be fixed in the next update. Amusing that they noticed a typo I had missed — the red ‘t’ in first NeatStreets — in this post!

A swell battery no more

The elderly (work) HP 2710p Convertible Tablet PC got a bit fatter today.

It’s about 5 years old and had a slim extra battery pack which clipped on the bottom extending battery life from a couple of hours to about eight.

I picked it up from the desktop dock and it felt a bit thicker than usual. Then I noticed the battery had expanded, nobody near it noticed any smell or sound so it didn’t ‘explode’. Fortunately the machine and desktop dock it was sitting in are both ok. I wonder what would have happened if it was left for longer?

Seems this is how lithium-ion rechargeable batteries die. They either fade away, offering shorter discharge cycles, or swell to destruction!

Google reveals the internet is a series of tubes!

Remember that line about the Internet being "a series of tubes"? Some amazing photos of a place that is Google:

Google reveals photos of its data centres - www.dezeen.com

AutoCAD Exchange (ed) for AutoCAD Facebook, but not for me

Coincidence is a strange thing. Last night I was playing around with some new TypePad Blog Themes and considering a major re-design. While that may happen it will take a while so I decided a quick “makeover” was needed. Although the design hasn’t changed I have reviewed the sidebars and cleared out some dated content.

Most of that was easy, Technorati code (remember them?), some dead links to blogs which have fallen off the web and generic search boxes I doubt anybody ever used. One item I looked at and wondered about was the AutoCAD Exchange panel (left).

It was launched with a flourish back in 2009, with blogger support via sidebar widgets, but I suspect never really became the community Autodesk had hoped for. Then today an email arrives announcing AutoCAD Exchange was moving to Facebook (per the screenshot below from AutoCAD Exchange):

That means AutoCAD Exchange is effectively dead for me as a work tool as Facebook not available on our corporate network. I suspect that is true for many and it makes the move rather hard to understand. While Facebook hosting is easier to manage for Autodesk I think it’s an awful move for the user.

Perhaps that view is tainted as my own presence on Facebook is reluctant, at best. I use it to connect with those who use it as their only social site rather than from any burning desire to be there. I mostly cross posts from Twitter Apps or TypePad as I hate the Facebook web UI and find their iPhone app slow, buggy and annoying.

So it’s goodbye AutoCAD on Exchange, I’ll see you on Twitter and YouTube but it is unlikely the Facebook page will see much action from me.

AutoCAD on Facebook — AutoCAD on Twitter — AutoCAD on YouTube

UPDATE 2012-08-01:

This is why we should never rely on facebook for doing business. reut.rs/MaG1oY

— Edwin Prakoso (@cad_notes) August 1, 2012

Edwin’s Tweet links to “Facebook sinks to record low as doubts grow” – Reuters

Yahoo! not ‘cool’? The Yahoo! Mail Visualization Project is!

I’ve used Yahoo! mail since 2007, simply because that’s when my ISP changed their mail hosting from MSN to Yahoo!

I also have Gmail and Windows Live mail accounts but my primary account is Yahoo! hosted. Until recently their webmail UI was pretty awful but I only used when travelling so didn’t really mind.

That changed when they unveiled a new interface which makes Gmail feel old and clunky. That’s backed by a pretty impressive spam filter as seen below. If nothing else it’s a nice way of presenting geographic and numeric data.

In Our Own Words: How Yahoo! Keeps Your Inbox Spic and Span

“We think the technology we’re using to keep your mailboxes safe is quite awesome and we wanted to show you how we do it, so today we’re going live with the Yahoo! Mail Visualization Project – a view of what no one has seen before using live data…how we use cloud computing and Apache Hadoop technology to filter spam and re-route email for the 300 million mail users we have across the globe.

We won’t bore you with the techy details in writing because it’s much more compelling to see…”

I’ll remember the day I got a netbook

It wasn’t that I waited for the Apple event, but the announcement of the iPhone 4GS (rather than some other sort of device) was part of the decision. I had been thinking about a mobile blogging solution. While you can do a lot with an iPhone, more with an iPad, my blog creation is pretty much all Windows’centric.

I write about Windows apps so grabbing screenshots etc is best done there. I use Live Writer to compose posts locally (rather than TypePad’s web editor), use RSS Bandit Reader (which can sync with Google Reader but I prefer a local app) to follow blogs and rely on ActiveWords to save lots of keystrokes while writing. That’s why an iPad didn’t really cut it for me but I like their long battery life and portability.

Why a Netbook?

The answer came in the form of a little Samsung NC110 Netbook.

• So far the performance of its Dual Core Atom chip seems ok.
• Cold start-up is about a minute, restore from sleep 10-20 seconds.
• 2GB of ram means multitasking with RSS Bandit, Tweetdeck, Live Writer and ActiveWords running is ok. It will open any DWF (unlike iOS even with cloud viewers) and, at a pinch, even run DWG TrueView!
• Real world battery life seems to be 6-10 hours depending on use.
• 220GB hard drive means no worries about storage, even backup up full resolution photos while travelling.

I considered an Ultrabook but they are still too expensive and fragile to be thought of as a “use or loose” portable device. It’s going to travel, be it conferences to bike trips, and the thought of stuffing a precious Ultrabook into a backpack horrifies me. I could trash three or four netbooks for the price of one Ultrabook.

Live Meshed with my desktop.

I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh, before that the Mesh Preview, to compose this blog since 2008. By syncing content it allows the perfection of composing locally, from any Windows device, with the cloud syncing content. Love that I can run heavy CAD/BIM apps on the desktop, grab screenshots there and begin a draft to finish later.

That day:

But none of that is the reason I’ll remember buying this machine. On the way back to work I heard the news; the day Steve Jobs died.

Autodesk & Instructables?

My first reaction to “Autodesk Acquires Instructables” was ”Why would they buy an old Pixar movie?”. I then realised it wasn’t “Incredibles”, duh!, but still had no idea what an Instructables was.

Phillip Torrone’s post on Make, which I found via tenlinks.com, is a nice summary of the Instructables community, how it could fit with Autodesk products and speculation on why Autodesk have acquired it. It also has some useful examples of the perils of other corporate community acquisitions:

MAKE | Autodesk Acquires Instructables: What It Means for Makers

The big news this week was “Autodesk Acquires Instructables.” It’s taken me a few days of really thinking about this for my column. Autodesk is jumping in to the biggest DIY community online — it’s a huge risk, with a likely even bigger reward. I think Autodesk knows how to make a thriving business for professionals, but what about makers? That’s what this week’s Soapbox is about: Autodesk acquiring Instructables and what it means for makers….

This statement on the Instructables Blog gives the Autodesk & Instructables view:

Instructables Joins Autodesk - Instructables Blog

“The Instructables community is incredible: you build, bake, and create amazing things, then share your projects and ideas with the world. I think it’s great when someone builds a project using instructions from our site, but it’s even more amazing when we inspire someone to start (or finish) that project they’ve always dreamed of. This has been my vision for Instructables: to have a positive impact on the world by giving passionate people great publishing tools to document their projects, and connect them to a community full of like-minded people”

“Instructables will be the community arm of the same team that makes 123D, SketchBook, Homestyler, and Pixlr, which will help provide creative tools, inspiration, and services for all types of creative people”

I don't know much about the Make community in NZ but it will be interesting to see how this develops or, perhaps more appropriately, what will they make of it?!

SAY Media, SAY TypePad, does it have a future?

I don’t usually repost a full blog post but the one you see below is rather important to the future of this blog!

Six Apart (Typepad’s owner) are “joining forces” with “media” (advertising company) VideoEgg. Mergers can bring good or bad. I hope this means a better TypePad but the line “continue to provide support to TypePad subscribers, and evolve the TypePad platform” doesn’t exactly scream excitement. The talk of “monetizing” isn’t a factor for me as the ads that appeared here were just to cover hosting costs, with any surplus going to charity.

Although not without its frustrations I’ve found TypePad a good balance of “hands off, no hassle” hosting with sufficient tools & control to do what I want.

If, as they SAY, that is maintained and enhanced I’ll be a happy TypePad’er.

Six Apart and VideoEgg create SAY Media: a modern media company - Everything TypePad

Six Apart and VideoEgg create SAY Media: a modern media company

Dear TypePad bloggers,

It's been almost a decade since we started Six Apart. With you, the bloggers and creators, we changed the way people expressed themselves online, empowering anyone to publish and build large and loyal audiences. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your continued support and trust as you've shared your worlds and your passions on TypePad.

Today we announced our intention to join forces with VideoEgg to form a new, modern media company called SAY Media. This new company will continue Six Apart's mission to make creators like you more successful. It will continue to help you create powerful and engaging content, and grow and monetize your audience. And it will continue to leave you in control.

Nothing in TypePad changes today, and SAY Media will continue to provide support to TypePad subscribers, and evolve the TypePad platform. You can choose to take advantage of our strong relationships with marketers to monetize your blogs, or you can keep your blog ad-free.

This acquisition marks a new beginning, but SAY Media is also an evolution of how we've already been growing TypePad for the past few years; now we'll be able to do it on a much larger scale. We will be able to better serve you and the advertisers that may ultimately fuel your voice and finance your passion.

As we move forward, we will continue to have active roles in the new company. We hope you will join us, as you always have, in shaping our future.

With gratitude for your continued support,

Mena & Ben Trott
Co-Founders
Six Apart Ltd.

Best wishes to The CAD Geek

I thought thecadgeek had turned (90º) green and moved to Wellington but it was just Twitter Avatar confusion with Stuff Tech in New Zealand.

Donnie is getting married and launching his first book in the near future. Congratulations and Best Wishes for both momentous events!