I used to copy over an old site, remove everything specific from that site and start work. I decided a while ago that was silly, because mostly I get given 2 days to do a weeks worth of work, and every second counts in that situation, I’ve just learned to expect disruptions and also to be prepared!

If you would like a base to start from you can download my boilerplate (femPlate!) here.

Its a combination of initializr, bootstrap, modernizr, some of my javascripts and other useful snippets I’ve found over the years. Its well documented and is laid out using the SMACSS principals. Its pretty barebones, in fact when you install it its effectively just a bootstrap layout but give it a chance, modify it, fork it and suggest some improvements!

Also, there were otters!!

WWT London Wetland Centre, Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, Barnes, London, SW13 9WT

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8409 4400

Email: info.london@wwt.org.uk

I’m building up my herb collection ready for a new place that I’m (finally/hopefully) moving into next month. Compact marjoram for bread making. Black peppermint for tea, Chives for omelettes and lavender for crafts! I also strung up my teapot plant ready for a hanging garden!

I bought some more today. Red creeping thyme, rosemary and a spinach tree!

This is my go to lunch on weekends during the summer. Its also good reheated for lunch too. Its a variation on a taco salad I sometimes have.

You will need:

• Quinoa
• Red and Yellow Peppers
• Green beans
• Spring onion or red onion
• Garlic
• Red Kidney Beans
• Curry powder
• Lemon or lime juice

Start cooking the quinoa in a small saucepan.  Meanwhile sweat the onion and garlic in a frying pan.

When the liquid has nearly evaporated from the quinoa add the green beans and half the red kidney beans.

When the water has evaporated add the rest of the beans, the peppers, the onion and garlic.

When the veggies are all warmed through, add salt, pepper and curry powder (I use 2 tablespoons!) and the lemon juice. (I use 1 tablespoon)

Enjoy!

My dad travels a lot for work so he always has a couple of notes left over from his travels. He had a clear out the other week and I’m not one for letting pretty money go to waste. So I framed it!

Last week  I updated my femMail script. Its (slightly) more up to date and has been divided into classes and is even namespaced. There is now slightly more documentation too. I’m not saying its perfect, but its already saved me a few days of development time on a number of occasions. Time that can be spent making it look prettier and adding new features.

I hope that its commented enough for you to get started. Its not insanely complex and I’m pretty sure it could be refactored in the future.

I’ve also created a milestone to add database support and I still need to test the femMail class to send via amazon SES using SMTP (I didn’t have access to the details when I created it so just used code I know works)

To summarise:

• I backup onto three external harddrives, flickr, dropbox and evernote.
• I have a folder that contains everything I will ever need to backup. If it can’t live there, I create an Alias/Shortcut for it.
• Each folder has three states. Green = Up to date, Red = Needs to be backed up and Orange if its only been backed up to one of the above services.

It was getting a little tiresome to manally change the label colour of each folder so I’ve written an applescript to do it for me. I couldn’t find anything similar in Google so maybe this will help! Its my first time writing an applescript too.

To enable you need to save the script ‘FolderHasChanged.scpt’ to “Macintosh HD > Library > Scripts > Folder Action Scripts”.

Then right click on your chosen folder. (I have them assigned to each folder individually, just in case!) and select “Folder Actions Setup…”

Then select the script and close the dialogue. Test it by dropping a new folder into the watched folder!

The nice people at Money Supermarket sent me an iHome iDM12 Bluetooth Speaker to review. In keeping with tradition I made sure to take photos of it with orchids!  If your looking to buy any bluetooth speakers they will be collating all the reviews of various Bluetooth speakers under £50 here.

Looks.

The device is sturdy and well built but a little on the large size, in a sense it is portable, if your going on holiday or packing for an elusive ‘warm spring day’ picnic. You’re probably not going to carry it around in your handbag though. There is an advantage to the size however, that they don’t look out of place in the kitchen/bathroom/windowsill. And being wireless is mega bonus.

It comes with a handy iPad stand too, handy for iPads that aren’t in a difficult to remove case, and that aren’t iPad ones. The neat thing though is that the case fits onto the front of the speaker to protect it when your traveling. Its not fixed in place though, its just sort of ‘placed’ but it’s not likely to fall off if its nestling amongst your unmentionables on the way to Tenerife!

Imagine theres a shiny iPad in that stand, and not the scratched, slow, scruffy cased iPad out of frame,..

Charging & Use.

Theres only one slot for your cable on the whole device so you can’t get confused. The provided usb cable splits into an AUX cable and a USB for charging. You can either charge through a laptop or commandeer an iPhone/android plug. It thoughtfully has a cable tidy attached to it. Using the device is just a matter of pressing (and holding) the power button until a green light comes on. Turn on bluetooth on your device and press the (play/pairing) button on the speakers. Then scan for bluetooth devices and select “iDM12″, done! Now load up some songs!

Sound Quality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if my music taste is anything to go by then my judgement on sound quality is not to be trusted. Thankfully our frequently visiting (because we haven’t found a house that satisfies our must have countryside, accept tea discerning bunnies, garden, gas central heating and room for three cars requirements) Sound Recordist (and new found Sound Blogger!) is here to help! The sound is SO much better than tinny laptop speakers. It has a significant about of bass, but not as much as the BassBoomz (who are in a league of their own when it comes to bass!), I’m not a fan of bass at all so it was quite nice, I have to say, because no one wants a speaker that walks across the windowsill when at top volume and a basshunter song comes on!

I’m also pretty sure that the speakers will get some use when Mr Sound Designer is on the go and needs to playback sound to clients. Either that or he’ll have the new Depeche Mode album on them!

The great thing about Google Reader was that everyone used it in a different way. My own personal usage was to load all items in a label into the full screen the interface (F on the keyboard, not the browser window) and hit jjjjj until all items were read. (and space to scroll down the longer articles) I learnt to be a quick reader and anything I wanted to take more time to read or in the case of tutorials, follow along with, was added to pocket. Anything I thought people would find interesting was added to buffer or pinboard‘d if I thought it might come in handy for a project.

My Google Reader flow.

Not being one for change I set out to find an RSS reader to replicate that workflow. I was also left with an interesting choice. Stay with a free service (or even a paid one) and hope it doesn’t go away again, or go the self hosted route.

I quickly narrowed down the list of ones to try, Fever was out fairly quickly, not that I’m averse to paying for an RSS reader but because it didn’t fit my work flow, yet. I’m still keeping an eye on it though, it looks good enough that I might be willing to change!

Next up was the old reader. I can’t really fault this one either. It behaves exactly like google reader but again its a hosted service that could go away any minute, especially with all these new people using it.

Then theres feedly. I’ve actually used feedly for a year or so, at the same time as google reader. Mainly for feeds that are image heavy, feedly tiles them nicely so when you have 100+ items to read it makes it much easier. My main gripe with Feedly though is that its too ‘pretty’. The reading area is too small and I dont care about related items. That said though, some smarty pants has come up with a userscript to make feedly look like Google Reader! and the team are very active at adding new features and communicating with users. So I’m not willing to give up on them yet!

Feedly (top) and Readly (bottom)

Finally I decided to look at all the self hosted options. I chose Selfoss. My decision was based on a few things. First, all the other ones weren’t as pretty, and their functionality was a little weird too. Secondly the others are all written in languages I’m not 100% familiar with. Selfoss is PHP mySQL based. The design is nice. Its a little buggy but it works on phones too, and even better, it doesnt load images on a phone unless you ask it to on a post by post basis!! Its also opensource (view my fork here) which means that If I find a bug, I can fix it and I can submit improvements too!

Selfoss

So currently I’m using selfoss but keeping feedly as a backup. Anyone want to trade notes!?

After the initial stages of shock, denial, anger and now acceptance I have decided that this is both good and bad. First, The good. Google and Google reader’s users have become really complacent about RSS in general. Its become something that noone talks about. You either use it, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you dont put your RSS links into your header!

Google shutting down Google Reader could be just what poor old forgotten RSS needs. A reboot. This could be the thing that brings RSS back into the limelight, suddenly people are going to be looking for alternatives, posting about them, creating them and non Google Reader folks are gonna be like, “hey, everyones talking about this RSS thingy, lets get involved” I’m going to call this the RenaiSSance or the RSSnaissance!

It could also mean that perhaps Google has some new wizardry up is sleeve or most likely that it wants to push Google+ as the new go to news source, and encourage publishers to post their ‘feeds’ there so people can subscribe there.

The bad. My life is over and now I have to find alternatives. That really is the main objection most people have. Its a (somewhat expected although we didn’t want to believe it) disruption to our daily routines and we now all have to start finding alternatives or change our flow.

Its worth noting that we don’t have to stick to the same old RSS process. You could start to use sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Twitter, Storify , Prismatic, Pinboard and Google+ as your go to news sources. You just wont be able to contribute as much and publishers are going to have to be really on the ball when it comes to where they start posting their content.

Personally I like to have control over who I subscribe to!

I’ve done a quick Google/Scout around to find some alternatives which I will look into tonight, but maybe some of you can get a head start and let me know which ones are the best!

http://skim.me/
A visual feed prioritized by how much time you have & what you’re in the mood for.

http://backstit.ch/
makes your personal web connected|organised|beautiful

https://intigi.com/start (paid)
Accelerate your Content Marketing. Quickly find and share the most valuable content in one easy-to-use platform.

http://rssminer.net/demo (open source: https://github.com/shenfeng/rssminer)
Yet another free RSS reader

http://skimfeed.com/
Tech News Aggregator

http://www.feedafever.com/
Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether.
Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/ (iPhone app to work with Fever above)
Sunstroke is the first iPhone and iPod touch app designed to work with Shaun Inman’s Fever°. Sunstroke syncs with your current installation of Fever and gives you full access to all of your feeds, hot links, and saved items. It is the best way to use Fever on your iPhone or iPod touch.

http://www.protopage.com/
Protopage is your own personal page, which you can access from any computer or mobile phone.
Use it to read your own selection of news and blogs, keep bookmarks, to-do lists, sticky notes, and much more.

http://memamsa.com/start/gr
memamsa lets you create your take on topics of interest.

http://signup.viafeeds.com/
Reliable, awesome news feed app

http://theoldreader.com/
Welcome to The Old Reader, the ultimate social RSS reader. It’s just like the old google reader, only better.

http://rssowl.org/ (open source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssowl/)
RSSOwl is a free and powerful news feed reader. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize and search news in a convenient, easy to use interface with endless flexibility.

http://feedly.com/
The better way to organize, read and share the content of your favorite sites.

https://feedbin.me/ (paid $2 /mo)
A fast, simple RSS feed reader that delivers a great reading experience.

http://tt-rss.org/ (open source: https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS)
Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

http://beta.newsmaven.co/
Rockin’ RSS for News Addicts

https://feedreader.co/
A place for your favorite people online

http://netnewswireapp.com/ (mac/iphone/ipad app)
More news. Less junk. Faster

http://www.frontpageapp.com/ (android app)
Browse News and Social feeds from your Lock Screen. No inputting passwords. No fumbling through multiple apps.
And its all 100% free!

http://rivers.silverkeytech.com/ (android app)
Android Rivers Fast River of News style RSS reader

And some neat ones I came across for sites that don’t have RSS. 

http://imnosy.com/
Get notified when your bookmarks are updated!

http://page2rss.com/
Page2RSS is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS reader.