PaulBiggs.com

Panoramas of the Vancouver Skyline

We spent a few days visiting Vancouver, BC after doing the RSVP Bike Ride (a 200-miler from Seattle to Vancouver). Took some great photos of the skyline there:

 

 

Daylight:
Night lights:

My Google Reader Aftermath = FeedBin + Mr. Reader

With the sunset of everyone's beloved Google Reader, there was a mass Internet scramble this summer to find new RSS aggregation and reading tools. Sure there are a lot of cool apps out there to curate news, from Zite to Flipboard, but when it comes down to the heavy lifting of plowing through your favorite feeds, nothing beat the simplicity of Google Reader -- nor it's huge ecosystem of apps that plugged into it. For example, being in the mobile marketing space, I subscribe to a couple of news feeds like Mobile Marketer, Mobile Marketing Watch, and Mobile Marketing Daily, among others. Between these, I need a dead simple way to browse through the 100 or so articles that they pump out to catch the valuable nuggets.

I tried all the popular Google Reader alternatives -- Feedly, Digg, NewsBlur -- and ultimately landed on Feedbin. It's great, here are just some of the features I love:

• 3 pane view (Feed List / Article List / Article text) for quick skimming of the news.
• Readability integration, which you can enable on a feed-by-feed basis -- THIS IS AWESOME for those pesky feeds that only give you excerpts, you can now pull in the full article text. 
• Supports multiple tags per feed (for example I have topical feeds like Tech or Photography, and then over-arching contextual tags for those GTD fans like @work and @home).

It looks nice and simple, which is what I want. None of this trying to recreate magaines with tiles and images everywhere. Just the news:

Then, I had to bring this all onto my iPad. Normally I use Reeder, but alas, there isn't an iPad version that supports anything other than Google Reader, so back to the drawing board (P.S. they have a great iPhone app that does support other platforms). After playing around with a few apps, I stumpled upon Mr. Reader, which despite the funny name and icon, is a GREAT app.

It has a ton of features, but the best one was new to me -- marking articles as read as I swiped/scrolled through the list. THIS IS A KILLER FEATURE. Most of my feed browsing habits are just scrolling through the headlines looking for gems. Now, rather than having to individually swip each one as read, or hitting the end of the list and then marking all as read in one fell swoop, it marks them as read as I go. Wow. I like reading my RSS feeds on my iPad more than on my laptop now. Great app: