Library clips

After my post on Google Reader workflow, I thought I’d try and give it ago, or at least set it up with my flavour of Getting Things Done (GTD).

This post is about personal productivity and getting things done when it comes to RSS reading, saving and posting.

HERE WE GO

Labels

- Feeds are organised in labels (or multiple labels)
…organised by topic, if I want just the essentials I have a label called “Top 10″
- “Temp” label for testing new feeds
- “Mobilephone” label (explain later)
- “Outside” label for items I bookmark outside Google Reader (explain later)

Feeds without a label

- my co.mments feed (people replying to comments I make in the blogosphere)
- my ego feed (people from the blogosphere who link to me)
- my Twitter friends timeline
- my Twitter replies (via Terraminds, as Google Reader doesn’t handle authenticated feeds)
- my notes feed (explain later)

Shared Items

Google Reader also has a way to publish linkstreams as an archive and the benefit of others…I posted about a hack so you can include outside items.

I use del.icio.us as my linkstream, so I’ll leave it there.

Starred Items

In this section are items you save/star…not necessarily for keeps, it’s more a flag, until you decide what to do next.

The Starred Items section does not have tags, so you have just one long list, but that’s OK for now, I’m going to only Star items that I want to blog about, so basically for me Starred Items is my “To Blog” section.

Just the same it would be good to organise these starred items by topic, or by draft post name I intend to write. If I’m writing a post about a new product it would be good to have all the starred items about this product together, but I’ll just have to rely on the new search feature.

Don’t forget the Google Reader hack to print out a HTML list of Starred Items.

Tags

Items are default tagged by the label/s of the feed they belong to, so if item A comes from feed A which is filed in the label “wiki”, then item A will be tagged “wiki” by default.

If you ever want to find this item again, use search or browse past items in the label “wiki”…search might be better, as you can’t browse for items by date, and if an item is old, you’ll be waiting a while.

Besides labels acting as default tags for items, you can manually tag an item as well, in this way you can locate the item in the label page, or in the tag page.

NOTE: labels and tags can also have public linkstreams, like Shared Items.

As I mentioned, stuff “To Blog” will be Starred, and stuff “To Read” will be tagged.

Now my problem is that since labels apply as tags to items as well as feeds, this means I can’t create a tag with the same name as a label, so this is my workaround.

I will have 5 different types of first level tags, here is an example using the second level tag “wiki”:

WATCH-wiki
LISTEN-wiki
TAG-wiki
READ-wiki
TRY

Explanation…

If I am reading an item from a feed in my label “wiki”, this item will have a default tag “wiki” it may also have a default tag “web2″, as the feed containing this item is also filed in the “web2″ label.

Now if I don’t have time to watch the video in this item, I will manually create a 3rd tag called “WATCH-wiki”.

Later on when I have time to watch it, I will delete the tag “WATCH-wiki” from the item.
Since it still contains the other 2 default tags, it will always live in the archive of these 2 labels…if I deleted all the tags, this item would live in the All Items section only, and not be findable by label.

So I’ve got something done, and dropped it from my list, but now that I’ve watched this video, then what do I do with this item:

- I may tag it in a social bookmarks or video bookmarks service, if I don’t have time I can tag it as “TAG-wiki” in Google Reader, this means all I have to do is simply bookmark it in del.icio.us when I get a chance.
(if you use FireFox, you can just as easily or just as quickly do this straight to del.icio.us via the add-on)

OR

- after watching it I may decide to blog about it, so I may save it into my Starred Items

If this item was a podcast the same scenario would apply with the “LISTEN-wiki” tag, if it was just a regular post the same would apply with the “READ-wiki” tag.

If I come across a post that has a link to a recommended blog, and I haven’t got time to look at it, I can put it in the “TRY” tag, when I get a chance to look at it, and perhaps choose to subscribe to it, it will go in the “Temp” label…then I will go back and renove the “TRY” tag from the item.
If there are no other items in the “TRY” tag, the tag does not disappear, it will just be empty.

As I mentioned before, I’m using the Starred items feature for items I want to post about, and since this doesn’t have tags I can’t collate these items together, so really I could snub the Starred Items feature altogether, and use a tag prefix eg. POST-wiki.

So you can see I GTD or action items by removing a tag/s or by sometimes applying a new tag.

Issue

At a glance I can never know whether a tag is empty unless I click on it, and then I have to click on “View All items”. Now if I’ve got some time to action some of this stuff, I have to click on each of my tags till I reach one with some stuff in it…I’d hate to have a lot of tags.

Another issue is I can’t search in a tag, or all tags.

Outside Items

What about feeds and items I come across outside of Google Reader, well I’ll just mirror my tags…since I use del.icio.us for bookmarking, I’ll use another bookmark service for this purpose, like Simpy or Netvouz, or the many others.

When I’m surfing the web or receive a link by email I can bookmark that item and tag it in a bookmark manager

eg.
I find a blog post about “wikis” that I want to blog about, I will bookmark it and create a tag called “POST”.
I find a blog post about “wikis”, if I want to read it later I will bookmark it and create a tag called “READ-wiki”.
I find a blog post about “wikis”, and this post has a link to a new blog I want to try out, I’ll bookmark it and tag it “TRY”, and so on.

Here will be my “outside items” Tags:

POST
WATCH-wiki
LISTEN-wiki
TAG-wiki
READ-wiki
TRY

Problem is now I have two spots where I’m collecting stuff to post, tag, try, and read/watch/listen…so what I can do is create a label in Google Reader, I’ll prefix it with a “z”, so it appears separate from my regular feed labels.

Then I will subscribe to all these social bookmark RSS feeds in Google Reader, rename them as above, and store them in a label called “zzzOUTSIDE”.

Just say I have an item in my “OUTSIDE” label from the feed “LISTEN-wiki”, now that I have listened to it, I may want to blog about it, so I can now change the tag on the item from “OUTSIDE” to “POST”.
So this item was in a feed called “LISTEN-wiki”, within a label called “OUTSIDE”, and now I have moved it to the tag “POST” (don’t confuse this with the feed called “POST” within the “OUTSIDE” label).

Now I have 2 spots for stuff I want to post, tag, try, and read/watch/listen, but at least they are in the same product.

Notes

Simpy also has a notes module, and you can even tag your notes, the bookmarklet is handy to jot down a note.

Problem is that the Notes feature doesn’t have a feed, so I can’t subscribe to my Notes in Google Reader…a similar service called TagFacts, has a feed and even tag feeds, but doesn’t have a bookmarklet (I can’t win).
You can use any type of service, there are heaps of note and to-do services that output a feed, I just want to use a bookmarklet so it’s effortless.

What about an edge feed like publi.sh, there is no public page, only feed content (the owner can manage posts in their admin section). I can post notes at the site, via an email, or via a bookmarklet.
Warning:
- Any feed not accessed for 14 consecutive days is automatically deleted
- Only the latest 15 items will be displayed in your feed
- Feeds are not password protected

Maybe I’ll use a similar service My.Notify, darn, no bookmarklet…there is always Webnote (in your user space hit the B key to make a bookmarklet…is this really a bookmarklet??)

BTW, Notes would be used for blog admin or RSS admin stuff.

Hmmm, a Google Reader gadget for the Google Startpage (iGoogle), maybe I can live in a startpage, instead of a standalone reader.

In the end I’d rather a tiny notes module in Google Reader, just like Gritwire.

If your notes are private, don’t RSS them as the world will know when you share your OPML or feed.

Mobile

I use my mobile phone email to read RSS feeds, I convert them at Rmail (changing name to sendmerss).
Instead of getting content sent to my phone email address, I have set up a gmail account that will auto-forward content to my phone email address, that way when I go on holidays I can stop auto-forwarding emails to my phone in one click.

The ideal solution is to use Google Reader mobile, but that would cost way too much, so I have subscribed again to a selection of feeds.

I don’t have my phone set on “push” as I don’t want to read stuff as it breaks, I instead request the email server when I’m ready to read stuff, and that’s usually when I’m on the train.

The reason I read feed content on my phone is for long posts, I don’t have time to read these at work, so I have gathered several full-text feeds that normally have long posts and subscribed to them in Rmail.

If I don’t read on the go, I will be tagging lots of posts eg. “READ-wiki”, and this will start filling up in no time, so I need to be able to read stuff when I’m not at my computer, especially long posts.
Others read on the go to get the freshest news, but for me it’s just ‘cause I’ve got time on the train to kill some feed reading.

These feeds I read on my phone have the additional label “zzzMOBILEPHONE”, items that I want to keep I leave on my phone, when I get to my PC I go straight to that label and action those items by tagging them, etc…then I purge the rest of the label, and lastly delete those items from my phone…this is my poors mans synching.

Trends

Google Reader Trends documents my feed reading behaviour as a report, it doesn’t act on these findings, it’s up to me to analyse and action.

Top feeds based on items read, tag cloud, how many items I read in a time period…also feed activity, like how often feeds posts (good to weed out inactive feeds, or perhaps decide to filter a feed that posts heavily).

Screenshot

Recap

0. All Items
1. Starred Items - items to blog
2. Shared Items - I use del.icio.us instead
3. Trends - personalised reading behaviour, help decide feeds to move, drop, filter, etc…
4. Regular feed labels (by topic)
5. Mobile phone label - select feeds in the regular topic labels are also labeled as “mobilephone”
6. Outside label - feeds from my social bookmarks (Netvouz) that contain items to action
…listen (items to listen)
…post (items to blog)
…read (items to read)
…tag (items to tag in del.icio.us)
…try (items to move to my Temp tag)
…watch (items to watch)
7. Temp label - feeds I’m trying out
8. Comments feed - replies to comments I have made elsewhere
9. Ego feed - posts that link to my blog posts
10. Notes feed - notes about RSS reading and blog admin I make at Webnotes
11. Twitter friends - the lastest tweets from me and my friends timeline
12. Twitter replies - people that Tweet to me
13. Tags
…listen (items to listen)
…read (items to read)
…tag (items to tag in del.icio.us)
…try (items to move to my Temp tag)
…watch (items to watch)

Tools

1. Google Reader (items to read and action)
2. Netvouz (bookmarking outside items to read and action)
3. webnotes (notes about RSS reading and blog admin)

1. co.mments (replies to comments I make elsewhere)
2. mobile phone email (read feeds on the go)
3. Feed Digest (ego feed)
4. Terraminds (Twitter replies)

1. del.icio.us (bookmarking items that have been actioned…my link stream)
2. Twitter (presence blog)
3. Blogsome (my blog)
4. Ziki (my Lifestream)

Note

Google Reader now has everything for GTD, the only other sites I use are Webnote and Netvouz, and I use a bookmarklet to post to these sites, I never have to actually visit these sites.

Items from Netvouz and Webnote are in Google Reader via RSS, when an item has finished its action cycle the tag is removed from this item…it’s never deleted from Google Reader.
All these items that have finished their action cycle will still be in Webnotes and Netvouz, since I plan to never visit these sites.

Related

RSS Smarts
RSS Reader Productivity
Collecting links for future blog posts