Twittlis 5

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Twittlis meeting —Twittlis #5.
.oO( About bloody time too! )

Excuse me? “What in the world is Twittlis,” you ask?

Well, I’m glad you did ask that question! :-)
You see, Twittlis is a meeting of people who use Twitter, who also happen to be around Lisboa on the first wednesday of any given month and who also like to chat with other people (which is obviously a given for almost anyone using Twitter.) The fact that this chatting happens over a few beers and, possibly, a nice pub-food-based dinner doesn’t hurt in the least. :-)

The (sub-)thirty-second pitch is, in words of Pedro Pinheiro (the organizer and afaik “father” of the thing):

Completely informal - arrive at any time, leave at any time. Come meet in person the people who you follow or follow you on twitter.com.

The venue that hosts Twittlis is, at the time of this writing, the most excellent O’Gilins Irish Pub and in it, again in Pedro’s own words:

Besides the wonderful assortment of lagers and ales (and non-alcoholic drinks too), there is a good and hearty selection of dinner choices, at affordable prices.

Oh and contrary to popular belief, the conversations are not all geek-oriented. Really. It’s nice! ;-)

Feed reading with Google Reader

I’ve recently started trying out Google Reader for my rss reading needs.

Until now (and for quite a long time, too) I’ve been using News Gator for that purpose. Together with the Mac desktop client —NetNewsWire— It has been my platform of choice because of it’s seamless integration with the desktop client, it’s mobile interface (which I think is pretty good) and, especially, the ability to synchronize status across multiple readers (yes, even multiple desktop readers).

At a time when I routinely used my iBook laptop, my iMac at the home desktop and my Linux laptop at the office (using the web interface) this made sense. Nowadays I find myself reading more and more online (via the web interface) or on my phone, but rarely do I fire up any of the NNWs on any of the Macs.

So I decided to try out the big G for yet another one of my on-line activities (seeing as it is already the keeper of most of my wired life’s information anyhow).
And the result (not unexpectedly) is that I am now ready to start dropping things from News Gator and start reading them solely on Google Reader.

The only thing that still keeps me from ditching News Gator entirely is the way that the G (doesn’t) handle private (i.e. authenticated) feeds. It has been pointed out to me that there are services out there that deal with this issue, but I’m not the least bit comfortable with having my credentials stored in some mom-and-pop web shop somewhere, so I’ll keep the private feeds safely within News Gator for a while until I come up with something I like better.

And now for the ironic part: why am I writing this now, instead of reading my feeds before lunch? Well, because Google Reader is not working! Ta-dahhh! Feeeeed meeeeeee! :-)