Jennerosity

As things have started stirring in me for action, I’ve almost gotten frustrated at being on vacation because it’s forcing me to be inactive.¹  So, I’ve been doing lots of reflecting and journal writing² to the point where I’m going to have to buy a pen here in Japan because the one I brought is almost completely out of ink³.  But doing things when I get home will require time and I’m already finding my time stretched thin.  So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve got to try to cut back on my online life.  I’m talking about the time that I’m just consuming what other people put out there and not really doing anything myself.  Sure it’s great for inspiration, but if I spend all my time getting inspired when am I actually going to act on that inspiration? During all this, I’ve had a few moments of clarity and been inspired to once again go through and re-structure some of my geeky online activity.  Namely, reading blogs.  It was partly inspired, ironically enough, by a blog post I read⁴  The post in question was a recent entry on Unclutterer letting their new traffic know about all their services and features and in that post was a link to another post in which they described how they filtered the Unclutterer RSS feed using Yahoo pipes.  ((Wow!  I’m so unaccustomed to Yahoo having anything to offer to the modern web 2.o world that I actually typed ‘Google pipes’ first and then had to go back and edit that.))  Basically they were able to use the free Yahoo pipes service to filter out some of the blog posts that they know some readers don’t really want to see and have created a separate RSS feed with less content.  I’d known about Yahoo pipes for a long time but never really had a venue with which to apply it and play with it a bit since it had only ever been described to me in theory⁵.  With this great example and clear tutorial on how to use it, I now had a a concrete idea that I could play with, and the inspiration I needed to work with it. So, here I am in Japan with a computer, feeling like I need to take action, and realizing that I need to cut back on my online consumption.  Add in a bit of inspiration on what Yahoo pipes can do to a blog’s feed, and you have me spending a couple of hours in our hotel fiddling with filters and feeds.  I also culled a bunch of blogs that I don’t really spend time reading any more.  I’m keeping all the blogs of people I actually know, and I’m going to try to batch process some of my niche blogs on a less frequent basis.  In my normal old routine I would try to get to an ‘RSS zero’ state every day, but I was barely treading water with over a hundred subscriptions to keep up with.  Now I’m going to try to accept that some categories don’t need to be read daily.  Instead, they can be saved for a time when I’m actually going to read and process that information in a more meaningful way.  I’m sure I’ll still make generous use of the ‘mark all as read’ button too.  I’m just hoping that my obsessive compulsive nature doesn’t freak out with all of the unread posts staring me in the face. Do you find that the abundance of information online gets in the way of actually doing things?  Have you found a good balance for yourself?  Got any tips to share?

1. Almost frustrated, but not quite [↩]
2. LOVE all the train rides here.  Time to relax.  Time to think.  Time to write (though mostly just personal journal writing) [↩]
3. I’ll totally suffer through the trip to the Japanese stationery store – LOL [↩]
4. Yes, I’ve been trying to keep up with my google reader while on vacation even though I know I should just be relaxing.  It’s one of the hazards of being a geek and bringing a computer along with us. [↩]
5. I can’t handle theory alone for tech stuff, I need to actually get my hands dirty in a purposeful play setting to learn stuff, which is actually why I started blogging in the first place [↩]

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