lifehacker
Does success destroy a blog?
Some of my recent posts have definitely had somewhat of a lifehacker bashing feel to them. And, well, that is because I feel lifehacker has moved away from the reasons I first started reading it three years ago.
lifehacker
When I first came across lifehacker whilst I was teaching English in China in 2005, it was full of great posts about how to be more techy and geeky and use software and web apps to make your life easier. It was choc full of recommendations of software to download, new websites to try out and clever hacks to make software do things that weren’t in the script. However, these days, although those posts still exist, they are swamped by useless posts about software/OS not yet released (Windows 7 being the current culprit) or gushing about the iPhone and iPhone apps that are simply re-inventing things that can already be done on a Symbian or Windows Mobile device but that, wait for it….USES YOUR FINGER as an input device.
Lifehacker has also failed to introduce a forum, even though users have been calling out for one for years, a restriction apparently demanded by lifehacker’s owner, Gawker Media. Instead it has implemented a comment system, that although quite powerful, still does not really allow its readers to have any real form of discussion other than about the posts themselves.
I guess the reason for these changes is, as lifehacker has grown, and good on them for that, it has taken on more editors to create more content and thus keep increase the number of readers thus produce more advertising revenue. Since there is only so much news or hacks to write about, it becomes harder to find original content and thus the quality of the content goes down hill. I wonder if this is the curse of successful blogs, or is it possible for a blog to maintain quality, even when it gets much more popular? Another blog I like to read is Ghacks, this blog seems to be where lifehacker was a few years ago. Its author now writes the blog as his full time job and has taken on a number of contributing authors. So far, the quality of the blog has remained and it still offers original content. It’ll be interesting to see what continued success has on Ghacks and to see if it goes down hill, the same way lifehacker has.
Remember, of course, this is simply my opinion, you might still love lifehacker. I just hate having to wade through the crud to get to the good stuff, kinda like why I hate eating an artichoke.
Filter posts from RSS feeds
Ever had any posts from a feed you wish you didn’t have to read through (I know, the pain the heart ache, you have to actually scroll through a post you don’t like, man, we are so lazy us modern humans)? For example all the incessant drivelling about iPhone apps, or annoying adds in feeds, such as the ones that lifehacker have started to add, like the one below:
lifehacker feed add
Now, if you are like me and find these adds annoying, you can get rid of them. There are a number of possibilities, but so far only one works at the moment, the rest might take time to work.
If you use Google’s Feed Reader and Firefox, you can try the Google Reader Filter for the Greasemonkey extension (and as mentioned by lifehacker themselves). This allows you to add filter words so that posts containing them are greyed out, the advantage being you still have the post to read if you want. However, I couldn’t get it to work and it only works in the list view. In fact, some comments on the scripts page indicate that it doesn’t work in Firefox 3 and that the script author is no longer maintaining it, so this might be a no-starter.
Next, you can try to write a Yahoo Pipes filter, such as this one here that I created. However, it doesn’t seem to work for me 
. This is more than likely due to my naff programming skills, you might have better luck.
Finally, there are two web services you can use, FilterMyRSS and FeedRinse. I haven’t had any results from FilterMyRSS yet, but so far FeedRinse has worked wonders. I simply added the full lifehacker RSS feed, then added a filter to block posts that contain [Sponsored] in the title. Then, subscribe to the feed in your favourite reader, and tada, gone are those annoying adds. Of course, you might have to update the filter based on how lifehacker changes how they present these adds 
Of course, you can add any other term to filter out, like “iPhone” to remove all the iPhone drivel that fills lifehacker’s pages these days. The disadvantage with this solution is, you can’t see what feeds have been filtered out, so you don’t know if you are missing loads of posts that you don’t actually want to be filtered out. But hey, at least the adds are gone
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