People like to refer to the act of marking all of their feeds as read as declaring RSS bankruptcy. They get to clear out all the items and start fresh. I realized recently that I needed to declare a true RSS feed bankruptcy and delete all of the RSS subscriptions I had collected over time. I had well over 300 subscriptions, many of them were to blogs that weren’t active or on topics I wasn’t particularly interested in anymore. Some of those subscriptions were from back in 2003 or earlier and were moved from Feeddemon to Bloglines to Google Reader.

I did this because I realized two things. The first is that I wasn’t keeping up with the feeds and they had simply become a burden. I used to rely on feeds to keep up with the community, but now I rely much more on twitter to do that. I also realized I was becoming interested in much different things. A large portion of my feeds were .NET related, and while I am still interested in .NET, my focus in the area has become paper thin. I care about ASP.NET MVC and changes to C#. Everything else .NET has just become noise to me.

I have also found Hacker News which I rely on more and more for news and community. It has not only become a great place for startup related news, but chances are any major Ruby, Python, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, or NoSQL announcement will find it’s way there. (and even some .NET topics).

I have realized that there are only two types of blogs I really want to subscribe to. Blogs that consistently deliver valuable technical content or business advice, or blogs of people I consider friends. I look forward slowing re-building a much leaner list of feeds and hopefully returning to getting value out of my blog reader.

-James

I have finally found the perfect margarita recipe and I just had to share it:

1 1/2 oz Patron Silver.

1 1/2 oz Grand Marnier

Combine those in a mixer with ice and then cut a lime in half and squeeze all the juice from half of the lime into the mixer. Put a dash of salt in the mixer. Shake it for about 20 seconds then pour. Delicious.

Sweet and Sour and Sweetened Lime Juice is horrible and don’t let it anywhere near your drink, otherwise you will end up with one of those horrible things they serve at most restaurants.

-James

I noticed Sean Cribbs was starting to post a daily blog post about what he worked on and learned that day, I thought it would be an interesting exercise so I am going to try it for the rest of this week and see how it goes.

Markdown – I have been using RadiantCMS as the engine for the ZerkMedia site as well as the Alt.Net Podcast but I have been just writing HTML for the posts. I have been writing HTML for over a decade but I thought it was finally time to give Markdown a try. It’s fairly straightforward and definitely makes posting much easier, although it will take a little getting used to.

Animated GIFs in Photoshop – I am getting ready to launch a new survey for The Lounge but I needed an ad to do it. I remember doing animated GIFs years ago using little windows utilities, but I finally decided to learn to do it the right way with Photoshop. Turns out it is ridiculously easy using the Animation window (I followed this simple tutorial).

JavaScript Fun – I have been using setInterval for my ad engine for sometime but today I figured out a nice trick that will help me reduce the amount of Javascript I use… you can pass any expression to setInterval, not just a function name. So I can pass parameters to the function called in setInterval (just remember that if you use variables they have to still be in scope and available). setInterval(myfunction(’a',’b',’c'), 100). I also learned that you can’t set a script as the innerHTML of an element and expect it to be run, you need to add it as a child element.

-James