I've just unsubscribed from your RSS feed. The fact that you never bothered to include your news item texts in the feed never was a problem for me; the stuff I was interested in was only one click away. No big deal.

But I really don't want banner ads in my RSS feeds, I really don't want them in every second RSS item, and I especially don't want them in a feed that only carries links, not content.

I don't "visit websites"; virtually all my information intake over the last couple of years has been happening via Google Reader. A couple of those monthly page impressions you're so proud of was little old me, clicking on news items in your RSS feed. That's not going to happen anymore. Your feed is gone, and I'm certainly not going to start dropping by your otherwise all right website just to see what's new. But hey, you're not going to lose any sleep over this, you have enough visitors.

I'm now switching my daily gaming news intake over to Joystiq. They're not quite on the same level of quality as you guys, but their feed doesn't slap their readers in the face by way of obnoxious banner ads.

It's a shame because I thought you guys "got" the net. So long.

Simon's recent tweet reminded me of a little feed reading efficiency trick I've wanted to post about for a while now.

Ever feel you're following too many RSS feeds? Ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of information waiting to be read in your favourite feed reader? I often hear people say that they're going to cut down on the number of feeds they're following. I've always found this a bit strange, since this number means nothing -- it's usually a few high-traffic blogs (I'm looking at you, TechCrunch) that eventually clutter your feed reader with hundreds, if not thousands, of unread items.

This problem is absurdly simple to solve, and the following solution isn't really very exciting at all, but to my own surprise, only very few people seem to be doing this. Sometimes the easiest solution is the hardest to spot, I guess.

What you'll need is a feed reader that lets you tag your feeds; the important bit is that you'll need to be able to assign multiple tags (or categories) to individual feeds. Google Reader will do this (it's the one I use), and I think Bloglines, too. There are probably others, but I've only used Google Reader for the last year or so, so I wouldn't know. I'm going to stick to Google Reader for the examples in this post.

You probably already have tags/categories set up for your different feed topics: web development, world news, gaming stuff, your friends' weblogs and so on.

Now, create a new tag called "_mustread". You can use any other name, of course, but the underscore is important, as it will move the tag up in the alphabetical list of tags in your reader's side bar.

Now think about which feeds are important to you; usually these will be feeds that you will want to know about as soon as possible when they've been updated. Tag these feeds with your new "_mustread" tag.

The trick is to focus on this "_mustread" tag during your daily RSS reading ritual. Google Reader is perfect for this, since it even lets you set a tag as the start tag that gets displayed when you load it up:

Even the iGoogle widget for Google Reader lets you default to a specific tag:

Now every time you load up Google Reader or iGoogle, you will be able to focus on just the important stuff, while ignoring the not-so-important feeds for the time being. If you end up having some extra time, you can go back to those and read them at your leisure.

In my setup, I have a tag called "_mustread" and one called "_friends", with all my friends' weblogs. Since these tags are at the top of the tags list, I see right away if something inside those tags has been updated:

There you go -- pure feed reading bliss. No need to let a big fat "Unread Items: 1000+" scare you.

Those following my Twitter stream will have noticed my recent excitement about gosu, a games development library for C++ and, more importantly, Ruby. Having only perused the sample code and (currently somewhat skimpy) documentation, I'm thinking I'm going to have boatloads of fun with it, even though I assume its capabilities possibly have some limits. Something this simple can't be that powerful -- or can it?

Limits or not, what I absolutely adore about gosu is its (very Ruby-like) simplicity. Have a look at this sort-of Hello World app:

 
require 'rubygems'
require 'gosu'
 
class GameWindow < Gosu::Window
  def initialize
    super(640, 480, false)
    self.caption = "I like cows!"
    @morn_img = Gosu::Image.new(self, "morn.png", true)
  end
 
  def update
    # update game information here
  end
 
  def draw
    # draw scene here
    @morn_img.draw(0, 0, 0)
  end
end
 
window = GameWindow.new
window.show
 

It can't really get any simpler than this -- you don't even need to set up your own game loop. Fantastic.

One of gosu's design principles is to only include the basics -- that is graphics and audio handling. It doesn't do any of the higher-level stuff -- scene management, collision detection, animations etc. -- for you. This is a good thing, since in most game projects you'd quickly end up needing something that works just a little bit different from what a possible kitchen-sink type framework would offer you.

However, after all that time spent with web development frameworks, building a game development one around gosu sounds like an interesting project to me. Something highly modular -- possibly consisting of pluggable behaviours, similar to how Torque Game Builder, another games development tool that I've been playing around with lately, works.

One of the obvious great things about gosu as opposed to Torque Game Builder is that, since you write your games in standard Ruby, it allows you to use everything that wonderful language has to offer. For example, I don't see why you couldn't write an online-enabled multiplayer game that polls JSON or XML data from a web application, or even uses ActiveResource to talk to a RESTful Rails app for some extra Ruby (and Rails) induced bliss. When I was looking at the network capabilities of Torque Game Builder, it looked like you'd have to fall back to the C++ level (and get the appropriate license allowing you to do that) in order to do advanced stuff like that.

Cool stuff.

Exclusive preview: RapidWeaver matures with version 4. Looks like most changes to RapidWeaver will be on a UI level. But that's okay, because RapidWeaver is brilliant already! The article includes a link to the sign-up page for a private beta.

Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails. A List Apart on our favourite web development framework.

StripAttributes is one of the quietest, smallest, but at the same time most useful Rails plugin I've seen recently, letting you specify ActiveRecord model attributes that will automatically get stripped of their leading and trailing whitespace, which without this plugin you'd have to do manually.

GitHub Officially Launches. I'm currently in the process of switching from SVN to git, trying to wrap my head around all the things git does differently. It's been a rough ride, but I'm starting to really enjoy it. GitHub, of course, is a great place to start playing around with git.

Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment. Andy Jeffries, PHP developer, on Ruby on Rails. Includes a mention of the recently released Phusion Passenger that has been making waves, making the deployment of Rails applications a zero-configuration game.

This is my suggestion on how to improve the excellent HAML's syntax in order to fight the currently required suggest "!" do or = "#{foo}!" madness. Nathan is considering it. Yay!

In case you're wondering, I have now retired my old weblogs, mornography.de and mornography.co.uk, making both domains forward to this new weblog. While I will be posting all my non-work craziness to my tumblelog, I will try to focus on work/programming related topics here.