Tag Archives: rss

Google Reader RIP

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Google just announced that their RSS Service, Google Reader is slated to be shutdown on July 1st, 2013. This upsets me greatly but I’m not really surprised. There was never any real traction for the service and they let the web component of it languish in the past. There was some noise that they were going to integrate the social features into Google Plus. Good luck with that.

What does this mean for the majority of users out there? Nothing really. I would say that if Google is going to pull the plug, essentially pull the rug out from under their customers by surprise like this, is that you get exactly what you pay for. Google Reader was great, and it was free and now it’s a dead service walking.

I can’t really see Google Plus succeeding against Facebook. That’s the battle to come. So they are reorganizing their infrastructure and pointing it to failtown. Okay. I would say that if you use any other Google product, like Picasa or Blogger, that you should migrate to something else like Flickr or WordPress as soon as you can, because if they kill Reader, who’s to say what’s next? The only thing I am planning to use now is Google Mail, which may be the last refuge for these scoundrels. It’s best to leave of your own volition than to be unceremoniously tossed out on your ass by surprise.

Facebook Notification Autodisplay Trick

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I recently moved over all my old Facebook Notes entries from the past and copied them into my Day One app for posterity. In the wayback machine I found an entry from March 25th, 2009 regarding a neat little thing I found that makes Facebook a little more neat. The entry back then covered how I found a way to make my Firefox browser automatically open up Facebook notifications as new tabs in my browser window all on it’s own. So as people that are connected to me on Facebook do things that fire off notifications, those automatically create new tabs in my browser and I don’t have to worry about playing catch up with the notification system and then overloading my browser with 20+ notifications. As I do other things my browser can tend to Facebook all on it’s own and I can look over the notifications in a more organic and pleasing way. I’ve just found a way to do the same thing on my Chrome browser and for anyone who is interested, here’s how I did it:

1) Start Chrome
2) Find the Chrome Extension RSS Live Links and install it
3) Browse to Facebook and click on your notifications, then find the RSS link and copy that to the clipboard.
4) In the options for RSS Live Links, add the RSS entry to the extensions RSS list and make sure you set the refresh time properly to where you want it and then check “Automatically open new items” checkbox. Click Save.
5) Save the extension options and then you are all set.

The extension will scan the RSS feed from Facebook every five minutes and if it notices changes it will automatically open up those new items as tabs in your Chrome browser. When you are all done, you can minimize your browser and do other things and over the day your browser will automatically fill with all the little notifications that Facebook throws down all on it’s lonesome. Then you go into your browser, see the notifications and then close the tabs (Command-W) when you are done with them. Easy peasy.