As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It’s an RSS reader that claims to offer “Visual feed reading with intelligence” and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there’s anything wrong with GReader, apart from the fact that it is from the Don’t Be Evil boys themselves. I just like the idea of paying for service, which then gives me a full-on right to demand more of it. That’s why I use Pinboard and Instapaper rather than alternatives.

Observations so far. Import is very smooth indeed. Every last one of my 401 feeds came over from GReader, including many that were either moribund or completely dead, and lots that were no longer of any interest. Were they ever? Alas, in bringing over all those feeds, not all were up to date. It took a while to go through them all, but it was well worth sorting things out. I dumped 70 sources and moved 77 to a folder called Dormant. One of the nice things about any RSS reader is that the cost to me of monitoring a site that updates very infrequently is essentially zero. So if anything dormant springs back to life, I’ll know. What would be truly awesome, in another life, would be able to scan all feeds and place anything that hasn’t updated in, say, 6 months into the Dormant folder, and by the same token promote any dormant feeds. The Newsblur API makes this look easy, but not to me.

Quite a few feeds seem to be broken, at least as far as Newsblur is concerned; I don’t recall GReader ever mentioning it. And slowly, slowly, I’ll either fix them or delete them.

The layout is confusing, for now, but only because I have been elsewhere for so long. I’m sure I’ll get used to it pretty quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are an improvement on GReader. Of course, sharing to G+ isn’t obvious, but then, does it need to be, given that G+ isn’t exactly floating my boat either at the moment. And I might have to make more of an effort to get to grips with this training thing, which seems to underly that claim about “intelligence”.

So far, then, so happy. And this is only day 2.

Ever a sucker for new productivity porn that will make me effective, successful and attractive to small animals, I’m kicking the tyres of The Pomodoro Technique. In a nutshell: work at something for 25 minutes, resisting all distractions; take a 3-5 minute break; repeat. Every four sessions, take a long break.

This all happened because I read an interview with Brett Terpstra, one of the most helpful and life-enhancing Apple geeks in the entire universe. His changes to Notational Velocity had already changed my life for the better, so when he mentioned Pomodoro (which I think I may have heard about before) I was primed to try it.

I won a kitchen timer a couple of years ago at the works tombola, and up till now I’ve used it only to rouse me from my slumbers workflow to ensure I don’t miss the train. The Pomodoro Technique suggested a better use for it.

Yesterday was our first full day together, me and my trusty timer, and I must say, I was impressed with the amount I managed to get done. There’s something about knowing I can goof off in 24 minutes at the most that enables me to hold off goofing off. Alas, the timer wasn’t quite up to it. The penultimate pomodoro of the day seemed to drag … and then I realized that the timer wasn’t timing anything. So last night’s first order of business was to buy a new timer, and so far today she has done sterling service. Unflappable.

View Bike ride 2012-03-18 in a larger map

Rome is not a cycle-friendly city. It could be, if the Romans could be persuaded to give up their beloved motor cars, of which, in 2008, there were 2.4 million to 2.5 million people. Not sure whether that is people people, or people old enough to drive. Either way, Rome has a higher car ownership per capita than any other European capital city. But I digress. As I must if I want to take a bike ride and blow out the cobwebs without risking life and limb. There are nice cycleways along the Tiber, north and south, very flat and pleasant, and a tad dull. The big park nearby is alright of a weekday morning, but at the weekend it is too full of people. So I just have to head out and hope for the best.

Last weekend I mostly went out in the direction of the neighbourhood where I used to live, in the hope that I wouldn’t get too lost. And it was a really nice ride, half urban, half rural, with some pipe-opening climbs and some swooping downhills. Coming home up the beastly Portuense was no joke, but unavoidable. And I quite like seeing the Corviale hulking up on the horizon as I peddle along the reserve below, flocks of sheep flowing biblically beneath the huge urban brute.

Today, though, strictly errands. I need to adapt the handlebars, which are a smidgen too low to be fully comfortable all the time. And other things.

We’re all guilty sometimes of over linking to our own material, in the belief that this may affect our search engine rankings. The practice is really bad on some ad-farms and joke news sites, where some sort of automatic software creates a scattergun of links, often double underlined, that are generally useless. And, fortunately, easy enough to learn to ignore.

Lately, though, I’ve become increasingly aware of some crazy link policy in an organ I have some respect for, and it is driving me nuts. I’m bringing it here, rather than the other place, because it is a meta-complaint; about the sources of information, rather than about the information itself. Scidev.net – “News, views and information about science, technology and the developing world” – will have a paragraph like this:

The institute, based in Lubumbashi, DRC, was established in 1979. But in recent years, countries have not been honouring their funding pledges, citing economic difficulties, according to the DRC’s agriculture minister, Norbert Basengezi Katintima.

Call me naive, but I expect that link for “funding” to take me to more detail of some aspect of funding, possibly even a story about how – gasp – countries have not been honouring their funding pledges. Likewise, I expect a hyperlink on research, in the paragraph below, to take me to more details of research, perhaps even on the specific problems mentioned.

Now, ministers have agreed to recommence funding to enable the institute to carry out research into crop and animal diseases affecting the region, such as cassava mosaic disease, banana bacterial wilt disease and Newcastle disease — a viral disease that affects poultry.

But no. Instead, each link takes me to a page of motley similarly-tagged snippets. This is plain dumb. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually decreased search engine rankings, quite apart from annoying at least one regular reader. I’d love to see the analytics for referrers to those bucket pages, and even more, a response from SciDev.net as to why they don’t actually add some value to their stories by offering external links.

Apple told me to move all my stuff to iCloud and so, despite the fact that none of my mobile devices is able to take advantage of the magic that it supposedly represents, I went ahead. Now I have nothing but grief. In fairness, I was warned …

GMail, which used to handily collect mail, will no longer do so. I tried forwarding mail from iCloud to GMail, but 12 hours later that does not seem to be working. So I’m in the market for a new email solution.

What would you recommend? Sparrow? Or something else?

I really liked GMail for two main reasons. First, its ability to collect and send mail from several different accounts. Secondly, natch, the search functions. And the giant storage didn’t hurt either. So I’m looking for something like that. Might be standalone, might be web based; as long as it will stay synched among several machines and be easily available, I’m agnostic on that score.

Why did I bother, you might well ask. Not sure about that. I like my @mac.com address (though I wouldn’t be seen dead using @me.com) and having a single identity across various Mac platforms. That, and inertia.