I’ve seen so many discussions on RSS, wether it’s good or bad, an asset or a necessary evil for bloggers. There are a lot of comments like “It causes people not to visit your site, resulting in less traffic”. This is totally true and if you think this is bad, you’re probably not making a lot of money anyway.

For a blogger there is nothing that is more important than his readers. Weather you write 3 line blurb entries or 10 paragraph long scientific analysis papers, the goal is to get readers who like your stuff. In other words, content is king right? So if 100 people come to your site daily, but 10,000 print your articles on toiletpaper and enjoy them on the loo, who cares, that’s 10,000 readers. Tell 10,000 people to buy something and many of them will, resulting in affiliate payments, revenue and whatnot, regardless of the medium they read it in.

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To all you Wordpress fans and users out there, version 2.6.5 of our favorite blogging patform is out. Get it while it’s fresh at the download site. There is one security fix (only affects ip based virtual networks) and three bug fixes. Nothing essential to get, but if you have the time I would upgrade.

Interestingly 2.6.4 was left out because of some phoney upgrade around the net with that name! 2.7 is still a bit away, and  is looking quite good, and 2.6.5 doesn’t offer too much in terms of visible change but it may still be worthwhile. If you can’t wait for the icontastique new 2.7 and can’t stop yourself from upgrading Wordpress (what fun!) then here’s your chance!

Let me start with my favorite one first. Minime is an app that can minimize any application or folder you have running. YAWN. Stop yawming right now! It also allows you to create minimized bundles. Instead of having an icon for each minimized app and folder, you can have just one or two which contain groups. This is excellent for creating minimized versions of your work and your play apps for example. Great find Martin from gHacks!

Monitor your folders and auto-delete files within with a nifty application called Auto Delete. This is great for some of the archiving folders I use, I can set to delete files older than 1 month, or 1 year, very handy to keep your hard drive from overflowing with cra… clutter.

A new browser, or rather new browsers, has come out called Lunascape. The interesting thing is that it has the Gecko, Webkit and Tirdent engines inside it meaning it can be made to run like IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and all their derivatives. This is a paradise for programmers, great find!

If you believe in power napping or are a follower you’ll love Napsounds, a service that, get ready for the shock, generates sounds for your nap. Who’s have guessed? You can get 20 minute tracks, and one of the great things is you can download it, listen online, grab it as a podcast using iTunes.

I just found a service through Make Use Of called Kaltura, which is a great app for video management on your site. It allows the management of videos, best of all in Wordpress with a little addon. You will have much more power over your included videos, which has always been a sort of gray area until now.

Springpad is an app I’ve wanted to show you before, and I’ll be doing an in-depth view later on, but until now take a look at the great introductory post by Varun on Make Use Of. It’s basically a note based organizer for your life, so if you’re into Remember The Milk, personal wikis, Google Notebook or anything like that, Springpad is for you.

If you’ve been researching some topics you know you have to go to a load of places to get the job done. Primarily many of use use Google and Wikipedia, even if you stop there that’s two separate searches for everything you need.

Eneter Keyboardr, stage right, to give us a mashup of services to make our searches faster. It combines 5 services, Google Search, Google Blogs, Google image search, Wikipedia and Youtube, showing you top results of all on one page, that’s what I call productivity!

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If you use Twitter or any other microblogging tool a lot, you know that character count is limited, while URL-s are very long. I’ve whipped up a new service called Shrink-O-Matic which lets you shrink your URL-s to a fraction of their size, but I also aimed to raise the bar a bit and create soemthing unique.

If you have a really long URL from ebay for example, you can input it into the shrinker and instead of this: “http://cgi.ebay.com/YAMAHA-DGX-520-PIANO-88-KEY-PIANO-DIGITAL-KEYBOAR-STAND_W0QQitemZ280287067006QQcmdZViewItemQQptZKeyboards_MIDI?hash=item280287067006&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1308″ you would get a much nicer URL, something like this: “http://somurl.com/er45A”.

Apart from this basic feature, Shrink-O-Matic offers a lot more. You can register, and if you create links as a registered member you can keep track of all the ones you’ve created, plus see how many people have clicked on that link!

The most unique feature though is the “Specuial URL”. This enables blogs for example to track all the Shrink-O-Matic links which point to them. It also gives them a unique URL, for example, all URL-s pointing to Hack Your Day have the format: “http://somurl.com/hyd/1j3″. this is great, since if you use other services you loose the ability to identify a website by its URL. This doesn’t convey all the info lost, but I think it’s a fair compromise.

When you log in with your special account, you will see all the URL-s which point to your site, plus you can also track how many times these were clicked.

All in all, Shrink-O-Matic is just starting, so a load of new features will become available, a Shrink-O-Matic bookmarklet is already complete(drag the link to your bookmarks), a Firefox addon is in the work and so on. Shrink-O-Matic will also be able to shrink your pics and your code (css, html, php for starters), and more is on its way!

If you would be kind enough to spread the word I would be very thanful, I am trying to make this service the best on the net and I can use any help I can get! Happy URL shrinking!

I used to have serious issues with my email account management skills. The biggest problem was that when I get loads of mail, I answer this, that, leave one out, leave one for next week and so on. If I saw an email I know I didn’t need to answer I didn’t even click on it. This resulted in widespread chaos and generally me being unable to follow my emails.

Since then I devised my own methods for keeping a tab on my inbox, and actually I never have unread messages, I very rarely keep a message for more than 1 day in my inbox actually, take a look on the next page to see how. Keep in mind I get about 20-40 emails a day, if you get a lot more some other rules may apply, I’ll talk about those in a later post.

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