Productivity Part II: RSS
As a follow up to my earlier productivity post for programmers, I realized that I had completely forgotten to talk about RSS. Although it’s not directly related to programming, it is a tool that should be in the toolset of any information junky. You can’t be a good programmer if you’re constantly reinventing the wheel, and the best way to know when someone else has invented that wheel is RSS. I can’t count the number of times I was working on something in Rails and within days of working on a particular feature a cool new plugin comes out to make it easier.
The best thing to do is to subscribe to a blog aggregator site. Various communities have sites that take a large chunk of the popular blogs and syndicate them into one stream. For Ruby, you might want to try rubycorner; for Ajax try Planet Ajaxian. Using an RSS reader lets you easily digest hundreds of headlines every day and if something interests you, jump in and read about it in depth. Another helpful thing to do is to subscribe to del.icio.us tags for things you’re interested in and see what people with more time on their hands are bookmarking :)
Beyond using RSS for the obvious purpose of getting news, I have also found a great use for RSS for tracking bugs. We use collaboa which seems to be a largely abandoned but very lightweight and easy to use bugtracking application. We have been enhancing it a bit with our own functionality but the great thing it gives you out of the box is the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed so you can always see new bugs and changes. You can also see when someone checks in code to fix a bug because if you put something like “Ticket #123″ in your commit comment, the changeset will be associated with the bug ticket and appear in your RSS feed. This solves the annoyance of getting emails while keeping a very high communication level because everyone always knows what’s going on.
I use the built in reader in Opera when I’m on Linux, and on Mac I use PulpFiction Lite though I’ll probably switch to NetNewsWire soon due to its integration with NewsGator which allows you to sync your subscriptions from multiple places so you don’t end up with duplicate info in your inbox. There are a number of other readers out there so start using RSS today!
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