Revising My Dlvr.it & Google Reader Combo

As you may know from this post I have automated the process of sharing items from my Google Reader account to my Twitter account. I made a point that I would closely monitor it to make sure it doesn’t seem too spammy or overwhelming for other users.

I had the feed set to check and post new items, one at a time every 15 minutes between the hours of 8am and 10pm. I also let it guess the appropriate hashtags and drop them in too. I’ve already reduced the number of hashtags from three to two.

Here’s an overview of the activity since the start of my little experiment.

You can see how the zero marks on the graph reflect the lack of activity on the weekends. Monday’s are the most active because any spare time I have over the weekend I may still read and share items but they wont reach Twitter until Monday. On a Monday I’m generally getting over 300 clicks from around 20 posts. As you can see below, the number of clicks over time closely matches with the number of posts over the same period of time.

For me, I think it’s been working quite well but there are ocassions when I look at my Twitter profile and see the ammount of hashtags and it just seems a bit gareish.

Will I be making any changes?

Yes, I’ll make a few tweaks and will continue to keep any eye on things. In the feed settings I’m going to increase the update from 15 to 30 minutes. And in the Twitter settings I’m going to remove the hastag placement completely.

QuickTip: Share Items From Google Reader To Twitter (Or Virtually Anywhere) Automatically

Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day, so anywhere we can make efficiencies in the time we spend on things (no matter how minimal) will always help. This is a quick tip I’m using to share all the great articles I come across with a little less effort.

I usually do most of my browsing on Google Reader on my phone. Sharing an item generally means opening a new window in the browser or switching to another app. This takes up valuable time!

Wouldn’t it be better if you could share it with a single click that didn’t interrupt your reading experience?

Irritation is… Not being able to read the full article in your RSS reader

Irritation Is...?

Does this annoy other people as much as it does me?

Truncated feeds will only give you a portion of the real content in your reader. They offer summaries of the article and the full post can only be read by visiting the website. Originally I though this was a trick by publishers to get more traffic on their website (in some cases this is true). This tactic actually seems pointless since anyone who subscribes to a feed is already a loyal reader. So why would you want to mess that up by irritating them?

Another function of truncated feeds, from the point of view of the publisher, is to help protect against robot spam blogs copying their content and other misuse of the RSS feed. Nonetheless this practice also infuriates the reader and diminishes the point of having an RSS feed.

There are work-arounds for this. The Full Feed extension for Chrome lets you read the full post with a simple keyboard shortcut. Once installed, just hit ‘z’ on any feed that doesn’t give you the full article.

That’s great because Google Reader is the only feed reader I use…..on the desktop.

Where this really becomes annoying is when browsing on your phone. It can be very time consuming and detrimental to your data usage to have to flick to and from the web browser and your reader.

Click here to read the full story …Hahaha!

Solving Some RSS Issues and Keeping Things ‘Free’

As you may remember, I love Hootsuite. Who wouldn’t? It’s a social media management powerhouse!

However, since they’ve turned freemuim, there are features I still need to use which are only available on the Pro Accounts. I’d be happy to go Pro if I needed to but this isn’t for me personally so It’s currently out of the question.

The free version currently limits you to 2 RSS feeds to one profile / 1 one feed to 2 profiles / 2 feeds to two separate profiles…? However you put it, the limit is 2! I need one RSS feed to 4 profiles and maybe even more in the future.

The obvious alternative is Twitterfeed. This was easy to setup and is working like a charm already. It would’ve been nice to have everything housed within Hootsuite but thankfully this can be setup once and then left to it’s own devices.

I’m not knocking Hootsuite at all but this is one occasion where I need to be as cost-effective as possible to prove what social media is worth.

Anyone have any similar experience on work-arounds with various tools to keep costs to a minimum?