Stay Current with Facebook Notifications using RSS

Since Facebook’s most recent update, things have been a little hectic for me on the notifications front.  Recent stories, All Stories, Lists…its making my head spin trying to keep up to date on what my friends and family are doing.  I feel somewhat betrayed by Facebook (and a little annoyed) when I miss a post by a family member and then end up reading it 3 days later.

I know I shouldn’t view this as such a big deal.  It is after all, Facebook–no replacement for texting, calling, or emailing someone you want to stay connected to.  And yet, when I am at work or away from my computer and I want to stay current on the day’s events, its Facebook I usually turn to (although I am trying hard to ween myself off of Facebook and transition to Google+–that goal has yet to be actualized entirely).

With that being said, there are some tools to help you stay connected, and make Facebook a little less frantic, and a little more organized.

The trick for me is Google Reader.  You can subscribe to an RSS feed of your notifications and read them through Google Reader on your computer in real time, or through your favorite Reading App such as Reeder or Feeddler.

To subscribe to your Facebook RSS feed, first be sure to install Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) or some other reader of your liking.

Next, sign in to Facebook, and click on the world icon (also called Timeline), then click on See All Notifications.

At the very top of this page, you will see two small links under “Get Notifications via”.

Click on RSS.

You will see a new page open up with RSS code.  Don’t be afraid.  Copy and paste this page’s entire URL.

Open up Google Reader or your other RSS service, and select Add Subscription.  Paste the RSS URL into the text box and save.

Your Notifications feed will be saved in your RSS feed list for you to read at anytime, anywhere!

Then, in the left sidebar, click on Notifications

 

How Safe is Your Password?

A couple of months ago, I fell victim to a “brute force” attack on my Facebook and Yahoo! accounts.  I am pretty sure it was due to the PlayStation Network hack by Anonymous in May of this year, because that account used the same email as my Yahoo! account.  The attempts to hack into my private information failed, but it left me a little paranoid.   Even though I *thought* my password was pretty strong, I became concerned about the security of my identity online and in particular, my password strength for all of my online accounts.

After the hack attempt, the first thing I did was research online, the best method for creating a web-safe encrypted password for my online accounts.  Problem is, I have many online accounts.  After awhile, you start using the same “secure” password out of shear convenience and sanity.  It is just plain insane to have to remember 20 different passwords for 20 different accounts.  The solution to this is a password managing software or “vault”.   This enables you generate one encrypted and hard to crack password and save it as your “master” password, and then, every time you login to a website, you can save your other passwords automatically to the vault, or generate a new random encrypted password to use.  After the time spent on initial set up, you simply login to your password manager once, and it will autofill your user name and password.

Of course there are inherit risks to relying on a password manager, since you are using it to store critical login information.  That is why it is equally important to find a peer-reviewed, tested, and certified software that will withstand the rigors of this level of scrutiny.  From the recommendation of a friend (thanks John L.), I chose LastPass. LastPass is free, has excellent reviews, a great track record, and will generate random encrypted passwords with a click of a button.  I have been using LastPass for a couple of months now, and find it to be an excellent time saver, and I feel more secure using the web now.

The second thing I did was go to this nifty website,   howsecureismypassword.net.  I used this to generate a master password for LastPass–one that was secure but one that I could remember.  The security experts recommend creating a “passphrase” with a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and characters.  So for example, your first dog was named Barney.  So you could have a secure password like this:  !mfdwnb!#1984, which equates to “My First Dog Was Named Barney, 1984 (the year we added him to the family).  howsecureismypassword enables you to type in a password and check to see how long it would take a hacker on a PC to crack your password.  In my example, the answer is:  39,000 years.  I would say that’s pretty secure.

How Secure Is My Password? Pretty darn secure.

So there you have it–in a nutshell, a couple of ways to fortify your online identity.  At the very least, perhaps stymie the hackers for another day, or a few thousand years.

He’s Dead, Jim!

Google Chrome rarely crashes on me, but whenever it does, I get a giggle out of the Ah Snap! Purple screen of doom.  Today however, I was greeted by a new (at least to me) purple screen.  This one’s even better than Ah Snap!  Thanks Google.

 

He's Dead, Jim!

Visualize This The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

As a someone who works with data every day, I have increasingly become infatuated with the concept of modern data design and visualization techniques.  As a “visual learner”, it makes sense for me to translate raw data in number form into something a bit more meaningful and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.  Maps, charts, and graphs have come a long way in the past decade.  Tired, worn out techniques such as generating a pie chart or line graph in Microsoft Excel; are now being replaced by ActionScript, Protovis, R, and Python.  For example,  YouTube videos such as the one below using ActionScript tell us a story over time of  how Walmart started as a small “mom and pop” outlet, to the behemouth it is today:

Not only is this aesthetically pleasing, it is easy to understand–and that is 95% of the battle when trying to tell a story with data.

Nathan Yao, the purveyor of FlowingData.com, recently published the book Visualize This that walks you through some of these modern data design techniques.  The first thing that impressed me after receiving the book (which I received from Amazon.com), was that it was substantial in the depth and scope of walking you through examples of how to generate for example, the exact Walmart ActionScript time-time lapse map as seen in the video above.  Think of Visualize This as a cookbook for data designers and data-driven professionals.  This was very pleasing and gratifying to me because I was expecting more of a conceptual book with pretty looking examples, and not a lot of code or other “get your hands dirty” examples.  Now I feel empowered to go out and try new data design and analysis techniques.  ActionScript for example, seemed quite intimidating to me, but after reading Visualize This, I have come away with a good basic foundation to learn a new coding language and actually see my efforts materialize in a short amount of time.  Again, another good feeling.

Overall, I give Visualize This 4.5 out of 5 stars.  I cannot wait for Visualize This 2, with more examples and state-of-the-art data design techniques and methods.

ChromeNanny helps you Avoid Time Vaccums!

In an effort to improve my productivity at work and stay focused (i.e., on task), I finally found a great tool for the Google Chrome browser called ChromeNanny.  It works similar to FireFox’s LeechBlock, in that you can specify the specific websites to block for a certain amount of time (for example, 9 am to 5 pm).  It took about 10 minutes to set up (hint: to set up, you have to right click the little gray clock once using Windows, click twice if you are using chrome on a Mac).  I can now only check Facebook, personal email, and other “time vaccums” before 9 am and after 5 pm.  8 solid hours of uninterrupted work!  I feel a lot better knowing that I was being as productive as a could, instead of procrastinating on things I know I should work on.

Click here to visit ChromeNanny’s Google Extensions page