Going Pro with Feedly

I’ve been a heavy user of RSS for years now.  I’ve tried and used everything from custom built applications and scripts, to browser add-ons, to third-party services.  Even this very blog’s archives are full migration and review articles form one tool to another.  Here are a few links, if you are interested:

For the last 3 years, I’ve been using Feedly, which I like a lot.  I’ve been thinking about going Pro for about a year now.  Last week, I made the switch.  Here’s why:

  1. I do love the service and want to support it!  After all, I’m spending at least an hour every day going through my feeds.  Sometimes even more.
  2. The Pro version removes the limit on the number of feeds and items in each feed.  Not that I don’t have enough to read, but I don’t like the idea that I might be missing something.
  3. The Pro version provides integrations and easier sharing to a variety of third-party services.  The one that is most important for me is WordPress integration.
  4. Their blog post about the upcoming changes to feed organization was the last drop – I WANT THAT!

Feedly constantly improves the user experience and brings new features.  It works very stable – I think only remember one or two downtimes in the last three years.  Their web interface is very handy and the mobile app works well too.  They have plenty of browser add-ons to make things even easier.

All in all, it’s well worth $5 per month for me.

16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Having knowledge of Linux is essential for any system administration, middleware, web engineer job.

Linux is used almost everywhere in production or a non-production environment. There are thousands of article, book, video training to explore and learn but that would be time-consuming.

Instead, you can follow one or two related books or online training.

The following learning materials cover a large number of Linux Administration tasks from beginning to expert level. So pick the one suits you.

Source: 16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Togliatti, Russia – home sweet home

I came across this awesome collection of photographs of my home town – Togliatti, Russia (June 2017).  By a lucky coincidence, even the house that I grew up until I moved to Cyprus got into one of the pictures.  It’s the building to the right of the tall building in the center-right of the above image.  Second floor, left window is the kitchen of the apartment where I spent almost 18 years.

The building in the center-bottom is the kindergarden, which I went to.  And the large building on the left is the school, where I studied for the first three years.

Things look quite different from how I remember them, cause it’s been years since I’ve been there (last time in 2006).  The neighborhood changed, memories faded, and the high altitude perspective is not how I’ve used to look at it.

Real Favicon Generator

Real Favicon Generator is a handy tool for setting up your website’s favicon properly.  It takes care of both the images (formats, resolutions, etc) and the HTML that you’ll need to include.  With just a few clicks your website will work properly with browsers, operating systems, and mobile applications.

With so many platforms and icons, it’s hard to know exactly what you should do. What are the dimensions of favicon.ico? How many Touch icons do I need? RealFaviconGenerator did the reseach and testing for you.

If you still prefer to do it yourself and know all there is to generating proper favicon images and markup, have a look at this resource for everything there is to it and more.

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev is a collection of 2,000+ carefully selected links to resources on anything web development related.  It covers subjects from Internet history and basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, all the way to tools, libraries and advanced usage of web technologies, and more; from network protocols and browser compatibility to development environments, containers, and ChatOps.

  • This document originated from a bunch of most commonly used links and learning resources I sent to every new web developer on our full-stack web development team.
  • For each problem domain and each technology, I try my best to pick only one or a few links that are most important, typical, common or popular and not outdated, base on the clear trends, public data and empirical observation.
  • Prefer fine-grained classifications and deep hierarchies over featureless descriptions and distractive comments.
  • Ideally, each line is a unique category. The ” / “ symbol between the links means they are replaceable. The “, “symbol between the links means they are complementary.
  • I wish this document could be closer to a kind of knowledge graph or skill tree than a list or a collection.
  • It currently contains 2000+ links (projects, tools, plugins, services, articles, books, sites, etc.)

On one hand, this is one of the best single resources on the topic of web development that I’ve seen in a very long time.  On the other hand, it re-confirms my belief in “there is no such thing as a full-stack web developer”.  There’s just too many levels, and there’s too much depth to each level for a single individual to be an expert at.  But you get bonus points for trying.