In this blog, I want to try to concentrate also on productivity and how to have a more relaxing / stress-free life. As someone with manic depression, I have to watch my stress levels very carefully so I am always on the lookout for ways to stay calm, ways to have a really great day and so on. I am also reading some productivity blogs such as Zen Habits which I am already totally addicted to. Thanks Aibek for recommending that one to me.

One of the ways that I am trying to be productive and organised is in my online life. Last week, I deleted 75% of my website, and I also deleted 3000 emails from my Gmail account which was actually very liberating (Gmail is so fast now, it feels as if it is on steroids!). I unsubscribed from about 15 different email newsletters, set up filters to send the crap straight to the email trash bin, and today I decided to uninstall Google Talk and only check my email no more than once a hour.

Being honest with myself, Google Talk was a serious impediment to my productivity. With its new mail notification feature, it was disturbing me constantly with its pop-up window and it was chaining me to my email all day. Now with it gone, and my determination to check email only sporadically throughout the day, I feel I can now concentrate on more important tasks - such as things that bring in money - REAL WORK! ;-)

Now I just have to tackle my huge RSS reading list! At 200+ feeds, that will take some serious pruning......

Google has FINALLY added a search feature to their RSS reader, thank God. In the greatest of ironies, the company that claims to be the world leader in search engines didn't have a search function for their own RSS application! They have it in regular search and they have it in Gmail, but until today, Reader didn't have one at all.

Power users of Google Reader rejoice! Someone has finally grown tired of waiting for Google to get its act together and has written a Greasemonkey script putting a search box in Google Reader.

Of course to have Greasemonkey, you need to have the Firefox browser. Then just download the script and refresh your Reader page.

I wonder what millenium Google will finally bring out their own official search engine for Reader?

Del.icio.us is one of my favourite websites and I use it to tag sites every day. In fact, anyone that subscribes to this site's RSS feed also gets a copy of my tagged sites every day. So when I read today that they are planning to change the site, I became concerned.

Don't get me wrong - I am not averse to improvements and upgrades. But sometimes a website doesn't need to be changed. The Del.icio.us site works fine, it is stable, I have never seen it crash, it does what it promises - so why change it? What could the Del.icio.us team do to possibly improve on what is already there?

This is one of the unfortunate side-effects of Web 2.0. Website feel that in order to "stay in the game", they have to constantly modernise and upgrade their websites. If a rival goes all flashy then everyone else has to as well, lest they be accused of "lagging behind". Why can't people just recognise a winning formula and stick with it? Minimalism is good - just look at the Google website. They've hardly changed their design ever and look how successful they are.

Sometimes it isn't the design that counts but the service you offer your visitors. The rest is just meaningless window dressing.

OK, I admit it. I am addicted to RSS feeds. They're really useful for monitoring multiple websites and I wouldn't get my daily fix of news if I wasn't subscribed to the CNN feed and the BBC feed. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time each day reading them so I cut out all the non-essentials and outright crap and came up with my best "must-have" 50 feeds (although sometimes that creeps up a bit if I have a run of good luck finding interesting blogs).

But quite often I am too busy to check my Google Reader app and when I do log in, I find 150+ new posts waiting for me. So when I was reading Steve Rubel's excellent "Micro Persuasion" blog, he mentioned that he has the same problem and he uses a service called RSSfwd to have new blog posts emailed to him. You still have the original posts sitting in your RSS reader but copies are emailed to you, free of charge.

What are the benefits of this service? Well for a start, I check email much more than I check RSS feeds. So if an interesting / important post is put on a blog, I am likely to see it faster if it is sent directly to my email inbox. Second, using Gmail's filters, I can have the email automatically labelled and, once it's read, archived so I end up with a database of posts from my favourite blogs. So if I need to find a certain post in the future, I can simply search my Gmail archive for it (Google Reader still doesn't have a "search" capability which, considering that Google is a search engine company, is really perplexing!)

The best way to set it up is to do what Steve suggests and set up a separate folder in your RSS reader (mine is "favs"). Then label the RSS feeds you want sent to you with the "favs" label and give the RSS links for your "favs" label to RSSfwd. That way, if you want to add or remove feeds from your RSSfwd mailings, all you have to do is add or remove the "favs" label, which is a lot easier than separately unsubscribing from each feed.

How do you keep on top of your RSS feeds? Can anyone suggest a better idea?

My Google Reader woes continue after I installed a new feature yesterday called Google Gears. It was the worst decision I made in ages.

As I said before, I fully understand the nature of "beta" products and I know they can be buggy at times. But with Google Gears, "buggy" just doesn't cut it. We're talking about a major malfunctioning tool which has been judged to be ready to be released to the public for testing.

Installing it wasn't a problem. It was after the installing that the fun and games began. Basically the Reader app started developing "connection issues". The page refused to load and instead asked me if i wanted to download 2000 feed items offline (even though there was never anything wrong with my internet connection to begin with - plus I don't even have 2000 feed items in the first place!!).

For every 5 times I refreshed and re-loaded the Reader page, it successfully loaded perhaps once in those 5 times.

And you know what? As soon as I uninstalled the Gears feature, Google Reader started working again really well! Coincidence? I think not!

My advice would be to avoid installing Google Gears until it has been more fully developed and less buggy. Plus I would advise Google to stop rushing out new tools and features when they are more than likely going to crash the page it is instead meant to complement. Take more time to develop things - that way you'll avoid pissing off so many people.

Anyone else having these issues with Gears? Or is Satan solely crapping on me?

One of my immediate go-to sites each day is Google News and I always keep it open in a Firefox tab, letting it manually update itself every 15 minutes or so. But being an information junkie and a researcher (hence my nickname, "Mr Google"), there are specific news topics that I like to constantly keep tabs on and it would normally take up so much time in my day to manually check out each search term in Google News. Hence Google News's RSS feed capability is an absolute lifesaver and it is a cinch to set up.


Basically first enter the search term in Google News. For this example, I am using "Putin" (as I do a lot of research on Russia and Russian politics) :