Last week I managed to keep up with my RSS reading on feedly and came across some neat articles. If you didn’t see these last week, here’s a chance to check them out 🙂

On Books

Nat on Reading Romance – (Blogging Outside the US) International Guide: Where to buy books?
One of the pain points of not living in the US is that getting books isn’t easy. For that matter so many giveaways are just for US citizens. This list helps those of us who don’t live in the US.

LitStack has a list of Six Writers Who Loved Weed
Here are the ones I know from the list – Stephen King, Alexandre Dumas and Shakespeare 😀

Kim Ukura on BookRiot – Pay-What-You-Want Ebook Service Curates Book Bundles for Readers – recommends Story Bundle
The concept of Story Buddle sounds great and I’d be happy to give back to indie authors by paying for curated books. They are currently featuring The Second Degree Bundle. I don’t really want to read crime and thriller right now but have subscribed for future bundles.

Dianna Dilworth on AppNewser – BookShout! Lets You Centralize eBook Libraries
If you are a reader on multiple platforms – Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo, etc. “Enter BookShout!, a free tool that lets you legally import and aggregate all of your eBooks into one central portal.” I’m yet to get to multiple platforms, (its paper and Kindle for me now) but I’m bookmarking this app for the future.

Dianna Dilworth on AppNewser – Rovio Enters eBook Business With Angry Birds Cookbook App
The idea of an interactive cook book sounds like fun and I’ve bought it on the app store but sadly can’t use it for a while since Che’s iPad has gone in for repairs and it doesn’t run on the Mac 🙁

Craft (DIY)

Licia Politis’s Quilled Babushkas on All Things Paper
I’ve always loved nesting dolls but the set Licia has made from paper with quilled embellishments is way cool!

Household Tips

Thorin Klosowski on LifeHacker says Layer Wax Paper On Top of Hard-to-Reach Shelves to Make Dusting a Breeze

Whitson Gordon on LifeHacker has shared a neat Cooking Methods Infographic. I’m going to up this up in the kitchen soon.
The Cooking Methods Cheat Sheet Clears Up All Those Confusing Cooking Terms

Dogs

LifeHacker shared this cool idea to train dogs to keep off the couch. The Monkey Couch Guardian Keeps Pets Off Furniture When You’re Not Home But if you’re like me and have given over the divan to the dogs, then don’t bother 😛

NOVA has made an insightful video on dogs – Dogs Decoded. I’d shared the video along with my thoughts last week. See it here – My Dogs Decoded.

Blogging

Heidi Cohen on Actionable Marketing Expert – 7 Steve Jobs Quotes Guaranteed To Make Your Blog Excel
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

Social Media

Jeff on jeffbullas.com – 6 Tips for Marketing your Business with the Social Media Mobile App Instagram
I use instagram on the Nexus One but I haven’t really understood it well. The other I guess is that I have an older phone that means the camera is not so great. Instagram doesn’t manage to make my picture ‘way better’ or at least so it seems to me on my screen. This one’s for those who have phones that take great pictures. 🙂

Heidi Cohen offers some useful tips on using Twitter to its best potential. Twitter: 12 Guidelines to Engage & Build Your Following

Articles for Authors

Carol Costello shares 5 book marketing tips for self-published authors on The Book Designer. The 5 Keys to Pain-Free Book Promotion

Joanna Penn answers 10 questions for authors that will help us readers find better books 😀 Help! My Book Isn’t Selling. 10 Questions You Need To Answer Honestly If You Want To Sell More Books

Mac Tips

Obscurity Hides Files in OS X in Plain Sight on Lifehacker by Thorin Klosowski

Amelita Puts Useful Commands and Actions in Your Mac’s Menubar on Lifehacker by Alan Henry

Did you come across anything interesting last week? Any posts you’d recommend for me?

I stumbled on to Feedly after seeing FlipBoard on the iPad. I was looking for something that would make reading my Google Reader feeds fun and Feedly does a good job of it – on the iPad.

Oh yes, Feedly works well on the iPad but that left me with a problem – the iPad belongs to Che so its not available to me all the time. That got me wondering if it would just as well on the Mac. So off I went to the Feedly site.

Other than the iOS and Android, Feedly also has add-ons for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I got Feedly for Chrome and took it for a test drive.

What I liked about it –
1. It has a nice newpaper like layout that makes for more colourful reading.
2. You can change the way the articles are laid out with the layout button at the top. So photos could be a mosaic and text blogs tiled.
3. Ties up with twitter and facebook to show newsfeed though am not sure yet just how useful this would be.
4. Based on you feeds, Feedly recommends more feeds you might like.
5. Also based on your feeds its makes recommendations from Amazon, YouTube, Flickr.
6. It offers 13 colours as themes but I like Classic Grey most.
7. Offers tagging – In preferences you can add a comma delimited list of tags you would like to be able to assign to articles for collection. Haven’t used this feature yet and since my feeds are categorised already not sure if I will need it. But I think I will try tags like read later, research, and share.
8. Allows you to tracks stock –wow! I don’t need it but wow!

What I don’t like –
1. On the iPad you flip pages to read further, here on Chrome you have to scroll down and it’s a lot of scrolling.
2. In preferences Feedly offers 5 different types of view settings – magazine, condensed, mosaic, cards and full articles. But when I tried switching between them I saw no change in how my feeds were displayed.
3. On the iPad I had an essentials list of feeds based on category. Here I find it missing and just can’t find a way to get it to show.

Feedly also sync’s with all gadgets so I can read on Che’s iPad, or my Android phone and then come back to the Mac and my feeds and saved articles are synced.

On the whole this is neat… Feedly definitely makes reading blogs more fun than Google Reader. I swear by GR since without it, having my feeds on the cloud would be painful but reading in GR isn’t much fun. Feedly syncs well with GR and lays out all the posts well. Feedly as an RSS reader is a must try!

Over the last two years I’ve collected (that’s a good word :D) 490 blog subscriptions but haven’t managed to read even 1/10 of them. So, this year one of my resolutions is to clean up my RSS reader on Google.

And how am I doing this? Well, I’m starting from zilch, scratch. Since I don’t want to lose all I have yet, I decided to ignore all that was before and create a few new folders based on my interests. Now I’m going to add blogs slowly through the year making sure to stick to the habit of reading all that I subscribe to 😀 and removing feeds that I don’t read over time.

Here are blogs that I’ve founded until now categorized by interest. If you have a blog recommendation in these areas, do let me know. I’m looking out for some interesting blogs. 🙂

Travel
BreathDreamGo by Mariellen

Craft (Fully DIY)
All Things Paper by Ann Martin

Crafting Queen by Karuna

Book Blogs (Reviews and more)
Chrisbookarama by Chris

Reading Romances by Nat

Of Books and Reading

Behind the Book (All about writing, publishing and marketing books)
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing by J.A. Konrath

No Publisher Needed by Jim. F. Kukral

The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn

The Book Designer by Joel Friedlander

Have any recommendations? Please leave them in comments 🙂