Sheri Larsen’s Flying Cloud

Welcome to Flying Cloud! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and thanks for visiting!

Not really news I know, but I thought I’d share my favorite Red Sox blogs, podcasts and pictures. I hope to make it to the rolling rally today with my family and have some pictures of my own to post tomorrow.

Player Blogs

• 38 Pitches (http://38pitches.com/) - Curt Schilling’s Blog
• Yooooouuuuukkkkk (http://kevinyoukilis.mlblogs.com/kevinyoukilis/2007/05/this_blog_is_of.html) - Kevin Youkilis’ Blog

Fan Blogs

• The BoSox Buzz-Blog (http://bosoxbuzz.blogspot.com/)
• Boston Dirt Dogs (http://bostondirtdogs.boston.com/) - all the funny pictures come from this blog
• The Joy of Sox (http://joyofsox.blogspot.com/)
• Over the Monster (http://www.overthemonster.com/)
• The Triumphant Red Sox Blog (http://triumphantredsoxfan.blogspot.com/)
• 12-Eight (http://www.12eight.org/)
• Cursed to First (http://confessionalpoet.typepad.com/cursed_to_first/)
• Out in Centerfield (http://www.outincenterfield.com/)
• Surviving Grady (http://www.survivinggrady.com/index.htm)
• Papel-blog (http://papelblog.blogspot.com/)

Podcasts

• The Officially Unofficial Red Sox Podcast (http://www.officiallyunofficialredsoxpodcast.com)
• The Original Red Sox Podcast (http://www.redsoxpodcast.com)

Images:

Forrester’s Marketing Blog: “I just don’t get it.” [i.e. Twitter]

OK, I am convinced - I’ll give it a try. Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/shlarsen.

I had an epiphany about RSS feeds a few months ago. I find that subscribing to feeds from business, marketing and technical blogs and publications allows me to track the information I need as a marketing executive in an internet software company. So I have subscribed to over hundred feeds and can do a pretty good job of scanning them for key stories. The key, though, to making following all these feeds manageable is an RSS reader.

When I first started subscribing to feeds I used the simple functionality in IE, but after only a few days got frustrated and started looking around for recommendations. Bloglines was the clear favorite, so I started using it. Being able to group my feeds by topic was great. I have 11 folders now for both the business and personal feeds I read. I will subscribe to any feed that looks interesting and read it for a few days or weeks and if it doesn’t contribute I remove it. Recently Bloglines released a beta upgrade that has a lot of great features that make reading feeds from many sources a lot easier to scan for the good stuff, while still making reading my favorite feeds enjoyable.

For a comparison, I recently tried the Google Reader, but found that I couldn’t sort the feeds in a way that I liked. So I recommend Bloglines Beta.

Del.icio.us : productivity

After many weeks of not making much headway in making regular posts I am experimenting with Zoundry - a desktop blogging tool. I found that it was difficult to get onto WordPress as it requires a fast connection. Also the post editing interface is slow, clumsy and small! I did a little research and found a very helpful post from Center Networks (http://www.centernetworks.com/wordpress-desktop-blogging) that reviews several tools for desktop blogging. Based on that post I downloaded and installed Zoundry (http://www.zoundry.com/) and am using it to write this post. It is definitely a lot easier and faster than trying to use the small edit box in WordPress. An added benefit is that it has downloaded all my existing posts so that I have a copy on my hard drive which I can back up just in case!

The user interface is quite easy to use to get started with basic posting. I have created several unpublished posts that contain the kernels of the posts I’ve been planning for a while but never had the time or energy to write using the available WordPress tools. I can easily save my edits and quickly move between them. I was also pretty easy to clean up messy text with multiple fonts resulting from from cutting and pasting. I have always had trouble cleaning up my posts in the WordPress editor. Although, going back to clean up some older messy posts was not so easy.

One problem I’ve found so far is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to manage my other (personal) WordPress blog. The software seems to support managing multiple blogs, but I couldn’t get it to connect to my other blog. A little research shows that the issue may be with WordPress and not with Zoundry, though. I will keep researching, but if anyone has some information or instructions, please let me know.

I will play with Zoundry for a little while and write a followup post, but after about a half and hour I really like it. Now maybe my blogging productivity will improve!

Del.icio.us : blogging, productivity