I don’t know how long i’ve been using RSS feeds for now but i know that i resisted it for a long time, instead continuing to open a group of bookmarked “regulars” everyday. What a silly sausage. A day or two using Google Reader and i was convinced of RSS’ merits. Nowadays, with a feed reader on my phone (NetNewsWire) i find i rarely visit the lovingly designed pages of my favourite sites, instead just digesting the constantly updated raw content.
The problem now though is that i often struggle to keep up with all of the feeds to which i’m subscribed. Leave it longer than 24 hours and it wouldn’t surprise me to find 500+ new articles waiting to be read. Slacker that i am, not even i have time to wade through such a backlog. Mark As Read is my friend.
That said, there are some feeds that i will always read through, no matter how high the unread figure is. And that’s the point of this post, I just wanted to highlight a few feeds that i consider Must Reads.
Atlas Obscura – The Atlas describes itself as “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” which is a nice way of saying that it’s a good place to find out about some of the weird and wonderful stuff in the world.
Daring Fireball – Possibly one of the most influential sites in the Apple websphere. Some call John Gruber the king of the Apple fanboys – which may or may not be true – I just love to read it for the cynical take on technological happenings (usually Apple-related).
Engadget – One of the best sites for consumer technology news. And they seem to be loved by tech companies so often break news and have exclusive hands-on previews.
Neatorama – It’s like the highlights of the web and pop-culture in one place. (I should also mention BoingBoing – it offers much the same sort of content but it’s quite heavy on political stuff which often puts me off)
Nope, nothing. Though rather annoyingly if i had still been playing the same set of numbers that i’d started the experiment with (06, 09, 16, 23, 27, 32) then i’d now be celebrating a £10 win. And the opposing balances wouldn’t look like this…
Lottery balance: -£51.00 // Not A Lottery balance: £51.12
Weird to see the numbers starting so high. To be expected in a random draw of course but i suppose the human mind spots oddities like this. Anyway, another tuppence interest in the Not A Lottery account.
Lottery balance: -£49.00 // Not A Lottery balance: £49.12
I was just looking through the search terms1 that bring visitors to this website from search engines. The list is certainly an odd collection of words but what stands out is the repeated appearance of variations of certain phrases. So i decided to do some collating.
Here are the all-time top 3 searches that lead people to this blog… (in dramatic reverse order)
#3 – “Bosanko” and variations – 115 visitors
Searches relating to light-graffiti artist Michael Bosanko appear quite often in my stats page despite me only having mentioned him twice to date.
#2 – “O2 Joggler” and variations – 175 visitors
I’ve written about the O2 joggler quite a lot so it’s no surprise that the blog manages to appear in search engine listings. What continues to surprise me is the amount of interest (search-wise) that the Joggler generated but how that doesn’t appear to have translated into sales. The device no longer appears to be available to buy from O2 and you could argue the market it tried to serve has been stolen by the iPad and Android tablets but i reckon there is still a place in the home for a low-power, always-on, web-enabled picture-frame device – at the right price. If it could browse the web proper i’d pay somewhere in the £30-50 region for one – maybe as a birthday or Christmas present for family. Hell, stick a webcam in it and allow for video-calling and i might pay upto £100. That’s a lot cheaper than an iPad.
Yep, Princess Leia and her famous golden bikini are far and away the biggest traffic generator for this blog. It looks like Dave Turner was absolutely right.
According to the statistics collected by the WordPress Stats plugin. ↩