Gonçalo Valério

Month: March 2013

  • This time you’ll have to leave

    It’s time to pack my feed list and move away from Google reader, something that I had already tried and failed before, because this time the service will be shutdown by Google on the first day of July 2013.

    The Internet is (mostly the tech community) in tumult, with every major tech news site writting something about it and big discussions taking place in many communities. You can say that this is too much and basically it’s only the shutdown of a service that’s using a technology already half dead, in that case I must disagree.

    In my humble opinion, RSS still has a big role in today’s Internet usage and is one of the few really open technologies, that improve the flow of information and that don’t rely only on major sites with walled gardens that belong to big companies.

    In my daily habits while I surf the Internet, Google Reader tops the ranking of most used “app”, when you count the in time spent (and the usefulness), it’s where I keep myself up to date with whats happening in the world, just to give you an example, here’s what the app has to say about my stats:

    From your 39 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 736 items, clicked 43 items, starred 0 items, and emailed 0 items.

    Since July 18, 2009 you have read a total of 29,114 items.

    The discussions about the alternatives don’t have been very enlightening, many suggest apps like feedly and flipboard, these ones are pretty and run on tablets and cellphones but don’t fit to my usage, that magazine style thing (and I don’t own a tablet) doesn’t feel right, I need a full featured powerhouse tool with lots of flexibility.

    One other option suggested was netvibes, but I’ve already tried this one in the last time and it let me down. So currently, the only web based options with good feedback left in my list are newsblur and theoldreader, which I didn’t had the time to try yet.

    So do you know any other alternative that I should add to my test list?

    Note: There is the possibility of desktop or self hosted software, but for now I’m trying to avoid those, so they will be the last resort.

  • Feito

    Generally when I have to develop a website or web application, I use technologies and frameworks that I am used to work with and I have more than basic knowledge about them, in most of the cases it turn out to be django and in some of them I also use node.js. With these two i can always achieve what I want without to much effort (with some exceptions).

    Some time ago I was asked to participate in a project that involved Ruby on Rails, a technology that I didn’t have too much knowledge and never had done anything with it, besides attending few workshops and talks about it (where I’ve just got a general idea how it worked). So it was time to give it a try and the fastest way to learn basics is to build something from the ground up with it and understand how stuff works along the way, and that’s what I’ve done at the time.

    So the first step was to find something or some idea that I wanted to work on and that would involve all the common techniques and stuff that you generally have to master when you start developing webapps.

    Here is what I’ve come up with:

    An inverted daily “To Do” list. So basically instead of making a list of what you have to do, you at the end of the day write what you have done and rank it with the amount of effort it took to do it. The system then store it, and shows to you in a pretty graph of your performance along some period of time. For a motivational boost at the end of each week it sends you an email with all tasks that you accomplished and the total amount of effort points.

    Basically it’s an app to monitor your daily performance and could serve as a motivational tool to help those who struggle in getting things done.

    I know its a basic app and I didn’t implement too many features, but it served its main purpose, at the time, of understanding the basics of ruby on rails.

    Yesterday I made it available on-line to anyone who wants to try it. For those who end up using it for some days/weeks I would appreciate some feedback, reporting of any errors you find or even suggestions of new features that would improve the app.

    So you can find it at: feito.ovalerio.net (Update: after 5 years, the server was turned off)