I’ve tried a number of feed readers, but I have some private feeds that I don’t want to run through any public systems, so for several years now (possibly since 2006), I’ve used Planet. Planet is a python script that churns out a combined feed as a webpage. Today I stripped out the private feeds and split the blogs I follow into Friends (and Communities), and News (and Webcomics).

A lot of the links have broken over the years, but I’m always adding more even if I don’t have time to read the ones I already have. Take a look, and fill me in on friends and good material on the interweb that I’m missing!

A bonus tool, I’ve been using the perl XML:RSS library to generate a bunch of RSS feeds where they’re missing, or improve them if I don’t like them. To wit:

• Reddit with only 5 items
• Doonesbury Comic
• Faux Pas Webcomic
• Sinfest Webcomic

I also had feeds for only the comics in the Phdcomics feed and for Mark Fiore videos, but they’ve since broken.

I’ve recently gotten very into IFTTT, a tool for creating custom triggers– on anything from posting on my LJ to entering 50 m of my work– and performing custom actions– anything from copying the post to my WP blog to adding an event to my calendar. Take a look at How to Be 100x More Productive: The 35 Best IFTTT Recipes to get a sense of the usefulness.

It has limitations: I can’t trigger an arbitrary API call or post to more than one WP account. But it’s getting there.

Obama plans to extend the marine reserve around the Pacific Remote Islands Area out to the 200 nautical mile limit of the US’s jurisdiction, doubling global marine reserves:

If we ignore these problems, if we drain our oceans of their resources, we won’t just be squandering one of humanity’s greatest treasures, we will be cutting off one of the worlds major sources of food and economic growth,” he said.

…

“This is incredibly significant and shows global leadership from the US on this issue” said Karen Sack from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“There is an amazing array of biodiversity around these islands, there are sea mount systems with a lot of deep sea species, all types of marine mammals.”

I seem to live my life from the outside in. Is that weird for an introvert to say? There are so many aspect of what I do that go the other way: my work and ideas and beliefs seem to come from an inner source. But living works differently. Being in the world is something I find myself doing– Heidegger would say, I’m thrown into it.

When it comes to what I want to do in the world, I begin at the furthest point: the distant future, the world as a whole, science and necessity. Here I apply my values and my ideas and my work, to come closer in. I want to help build an biocentric future, so I read and develop skills. But when it comes to applying those skills, I work on what’s at hand. I organize everything my time around doing things– digging into technical issues and finding problems that need solving. In that, I work with people, constantly. I don’t choose those people, but I do love them. They’re the people at hand. I organize projects with them, and get inspired by them, and attend endless meetings for them.

All of which, as an introvert, can seem like a huge waste of time. I find my time hemmed in by meetings, sapped by emails, dispersed to coordination.

I was chatting with a friend– let’s call her Polecat– about people who do everything with other people. I didn’t realize she was talking partly about me. It’s another way of living one’s live from the outside in: as a character said in Waking Life, “The advantage to meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present you to yourself.”

It's seems like I look for this post of siderea's about once a year, and I always wish more people would link to it.  So here it is, [soc/anthro] The Recipe, Or What you don’t know about LJ/DW:

There’s a recipe. It’s a recipe for maximally useful-for-engendering-virtual-community-LJ/DW-style. I’m not sure I have it exactly down yet — this is the alpha version — but I’m pretty sure that, contrary to a lot of LJ/DW users think, it goes something like this:

Recommended Minimum Weekly Posts by Type:
0.5 diary entry
3 pointers
0.5 bleg
0.25 op ed