I’ve been trying out a pair of shoes, the Nike Free 3.0. All the Nike Free shoes are supposed to reassemble walking barefoot. The sole is cut in a special pattern to maximise flexibility and increase the use of all the small mussels in or feet.
The top of the shoe is like a sock, very tight and soft and extremely comfortable. But the tight upper side thus make the shoes a bit hard to put on.
It’s almost like walking on air. The sole is extremely soft and follow your feet and steps amazingly well. The comfort in the upper side of the shoe is perfect when you are barefoot or if your socks are very slim, but it’s not very comfortable with regular socks in these shoes.
The shoe is an excellent sneaker or walking shoe, there is a couple of models with different amount of support. The number in name tell the ”distance” from the ground, I’m not sure if it’s millimetres but I know that 3.0 is closer to barefoot than the 4.0 and 6.0 models.
If you want to run in the Nike Free shoe you should start out with short distances. Our bodies are not use to walking and running barefoot but they can change if we habituate slowly. If you have problems already or are unsure on how body will respond it might be a good idea to start with just walking.
I’ve started to walk back and fourth to work in my new Nikes and I really like them. They look nice but I think I would use them even more if they looked more like a sneaker. But I actually think that Nike have sneakers with the same soft sole, so I might get myself another pair some day. I actually think my feet would love me if I did.
But I also figured that it might be a good idea to just quickly describe how you could read blogs and news sites with a reader and how to create your own feed (you probably have one already), just because it’s really easy to set up but not that many people are using it yet.
Reading feeds
When you read a lot of blogs or news sites, it takes a lot of time to visit them all. It’s not very efficient if you only visit to find out that they haven’t updated since last time you visited.
Using an RSS reader or some other blog reading service is a simple solution to this problem. Instead of visiting each blog at a time you will get all the updates you want in one place. It’s only one place to visit instead of hundreds of blogs, and it would say that it’s a much more efficient way to spend your time.
I’m using a small app called Reeder that can be used on a mac, Ipad or Iphone. It’s based on Google Reader, probably the most common way to organize your blog reading, but I prefer reading in Reeder. I can always use Google Reader instead if I want to, Reeder is like a skin, it just looks nicer and have some extra functionalities. There are other solutions, like Bloglovin (co-founded by Mattias Swenson who is together with Carolina Engman also known as Fashionsquad). Try to find something YOU like because this is mostly just about taste.
If you decide to use Reeder or Google Reader you should sign up on the Google Reader website and start to add the blogs you read. You will need the url or sometimes the feed url to the blogs, look for a subscription link (or try to write /feed in the url field) if you can’t make it work with just the regular url.
When adding a new blog to the list in Google Reader you will see the 10 latest posts, read them or mark all as read. Each time a blog you’ve subscribed to updates you will see the post in the top of the list of new posts.
If you find a new blog that seems interesting just subscribe and you will get all the updates. It’s both smart and simple!
Creating a feed
So, if you have a blog or news site and want others to be able to subscribe, is there anything you can do? You probably already have a feed, even though you might not now it. A feed is pretty much a text file that updates when you update your site and this file can be read by different apps and services.
The point of having a feed is that your readers can read your blog through an RSS reader instead of visiting your site. Each time you update your blog your followers will get the post automatically and they don’t have to remember to visit your blog. There are both advantages and disadvantages with a feeds since you might get more readers but fewer visitors. If you have ads on your website you probably need visitors too, not just readers.
There are a couple of solutions to solve this, you can for instance show just the first part of your posts in your feed and it might make people visit more. The risk is however that readers get irritated and end their subscriptions. Since I don’t have any ads on this site, and I prefer that people read even though they might not visit, I’ve decided to not cut off the posts in my feed.
If you use a service to set up your feed you’re usually able to make settings like these for your feed. I use Google Feedburner to set up my feed and I’ve been doing so for quite some time now. It’s free and quite simple, but I can’t really tell if it’s the best solution. A list of other similar services can be found here.
There are a couple of different settings to choose from when you set up your feed, such as if you want to use the RSS or Atom feed from your webpage. No one I ask seems to know the difference between these alternatives and I believe they’re doing pretty much the same thing. I use the RSS 2.0 feed myself but if someone knows anything about the differences, please leave a comment.
To burn a feed with Feedburner you need to create an account (use your Google account if you have one already) and fill out your url.
Usually your blog or news feed is located at yourdomain.com/feed, but when you use feedburner you get a new url with your feed eg. feeds.feedburner.com/username. If you want to offer subscriptions to your readers you should use this url, either as a link or through some subscription plugin.
If you want your usual feed (yourdomain.com/feed) to redirect to the Feedburner feed automatically you can use a plugin for WordPress, I use the FD Feedburner Plugin and it works just fine.
I think that’s all. Don’t forget to remember your visitors to subscribe and make sure to have a visible link or icon.
We talked quite a lot about “women in tech” this weekend, mostly because it was so many great female speakers at Startup Day Stockholm. In one conversation I referred to this talk by Caroline Drucker from SoundCloud and realized that a lot of people hadn’t seen it, so here it is once again.
This time I also found a blog post from Caroline herself on her own thoughts about her talk – read it!
If you want to know more about Caroline, and understand Swedish, you can read an interview I did with her in november last year.
I’m very very tired when I’m writing this post. But here are som photographs from Startup Day Stockholm that I went to yesterday.
Jesper Ericsson was the man of the day (and the ungodly hour), he introduced us to the event that started with an inspirational talk about what’s important and why.
A little later two Islandic entreprenours, Vala Halldorsdottir and Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir, talked about their documentary: The Startup Kids. They also showed us a short clip from the movie and I really want to see all of it now.
Anna Oscarsson was talking about digitalizing an analogue infrastructure and she was great as always followerd by Hoa Ly from Hoa’s Tool Shop who talked about passion and innovations. He was playing music at the after party at Scandic Malmen across the street later in the evening.
Almost 500 people were visiting Debaser for the event and everyone was nice and inspiring. Other things I remember is the panel about community management moderated by Paulina Modlitba Söderlund. Evelina Ander, Lisa Enckell and Pernilla Åström were participating. Andreas Ehn and Hjalmar Winblad, co-founders of Wrapp, talked about their journey. Hoa Ly The rest of the evening is another story, I might show you parts of it tomorrow.
