In his post titled Feed Archaeology Charlie Wood writes about the little known NewsGator Archive Service.  NewsGator has archived all the RSS feeds that its users have subscribed to since it started.  Since it only archives feeds that users subscribe to, there isn’t a spam / splog problem in the archive.

If your blog magically disappears (like Charlie’s did (due in his case to a server that died) you can easily recover it from the NewsGator Archive Service.  In addition, if you use FeedBurner for your feed, your readers might not even notice.

For the nerds among you, here is the one command (assuming you have curl installed) that Charlie needed to recover his blog content.

curl https://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/archivesvc.asmx/GetFirst \ -d xmlurls=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fmoonwatcher \ -d numItems=100 -d sortAscending=TRUE -u uname:pword

If you know me, you know that I have a weird obsession with bathrooms.  It goes back a long time and definitely has some strange psychologic underpinnings that I’m sure Dr. Freud would have fun discussing.  I don’t fight it – I just roll with it.

Several years ago, I had a discussion with Heidi Roizen about her failed attempt to get her name on a bathroom at Stanford during their fundraising drive for a new building on campus.  The rejection came with the admonishment that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to do.  I laughed and told Heidi – "no problem – I’m sure I can get one at MIT in no time – they are more flexible in their thinking about what is appropriate."  Boy was I wrong – I’ve written about the story before on this blog if you are interested.   The bottom line is the request apparently went around the system before being crushed by the bureaucracy somewhere at MIT.  Their loss.

No such challenge at CU Boulder.  I wrote about the immediate response of ATLAS’s director John Bennett to my Stanford / MIT bathroom story.  Following is the result a few months later.

That’s me standing in the doorway of the second floor men’s room at ATLAS next to my plaque which says "“The Best Ideas Often Come At Inconvenient Times – Don’t Ever Close Your Mind To Them.”

John – nicely done.  The Boulder Daily Camera interviewed me yesterday and wrote a fun story about it, including the punch line from John that ATLAS has seven other bathrooms that have the potential to be named. 

MIT – that could have been your money! 

Great advice from Julie Alexandria on WallStrip to all the big thinkers in Davos who are Scornful of US Policies and worried about the impact of the fall of the “wounded giant.”  To you, Julie says “Eh screw it.  Let’s dance.”

I loved George Soros’ quote: ““The current crisis is not only the bust that follows the housing boom. It’s basically the end of a 60-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency.”  Is the US finally having it’s post-Edwardian England moment?

Andrew Hyde – the wonderful, fun, and friendly founder of StartupWeekend – wrote a great post recently On Burning Out.  He’s back – after taking a long break – which is great.  Last week I had dinner with another long time friend and entrepreneur who told me he "had the blues."  His company had a strong 2007 and is well positioned for 2008, but he’s been sick since the holidays, has been feeling down, and can’t seem to shake it.

Burning out is a chronic problem with entrepreneurs. In the early 1990’s – for a year before and after I sold my first company – I went through a tough period where I got very depressed.  I held it together and got through it, but the memory of how I felt is never far away.  I was completely burned out.  I’ll be forever grateful to Amy and my business partner Dave for putting up with me during this time period since they were the ones that had to deal with the brunt of my depression.

A week ago, while lying in bed, I told Amy that I felt inappropriately anxious.  Very little rattles me and whenever I feel anxious, I know something is up. I’d had a mild cold for a couple of weeks, had just come off three weeks of "chill out time" in Keystone at the end of the year (where I worked, but not that hard), and was off to a really intense start of the new year.  I’m also running a marathon in mid-February and even though I had been sick have been logging plenty of miles.

I woke up at 4am (an hour earlier than normal) – wide awake.  I got up, worked, and at breakfast with Amy a couple of hours later repeated that I felt weird.  She looked at me and wisely said "I bet you are just exhausted."  This didn’t really make sense since I’d just had three weeks of chill time, but I hadn’t slept much the first week of the year.

I fought through the day, got home early, and went to bed at 7pm.  I slept straight through to 8am the next morning, got up, and felt great.  The anxiety was gone and a week later I don’t really remember it very well.

I put in another 14 hours in bed on Friday night – sleeping well into the afternoon on Saturday.  I ran 16.33 miles on Sunday and felt great.  Whatever vestiges of my cold, fatigue, or anxiety were completely gone. 

I have simple advice for all entrepreneurs – listen to your body.  Remember the quote from Dune "Fear is the mindkiller" and remember that most fears and anxiety are born of fatigue.  Sometimes I forget, but I have this awesome life partner who reminds me on a regular basis.  Don’t worry about "pacing yourself" – that’s probably not possible – but when you see signs of burn out, take it easy for a little while.

The TechStars 2008 Applications are now open.  Last year we had 302 applications and accepted 10 companies.  8 of the 10 companies are now either financed or profitable and several have received acquisition offers.  If you apply before March 3rd, you are invited to come to our TechStars for a Day program.

We are having a TechStars party in the Bay Area this Thursday evening January 24th from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Plug and Play Tech Center (440 N Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, California.)  Space is limited so if you are want to come, please sign up for the event on Facebook or drop the TechStars folks a note.

We’ve got some great new mentors for 2008, including Eric Marcoullier (the co-founder of MyBlogLog which was acquired by Yahoo) and Dick Costolo (the co-founder of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google.)

If you are in the Bay Area, I’m looking forward to seeing you Thursday night.

I was a keynote speaker at the University Venture Fund Conference last Friday.  I had a great time and was blown away by the quality of the 300+ undergrad and graduate students from around the country who participate in the UVF program.

Most of the conference was very relevant and substantive, including a great list from Martin Plaehn’s (Bungee Labs CEO) titled Quick Hits: Do’s and Dont’s of Entrepreneurship which was posted earlier today on Will Price of Hummer Winblad’s blog.  I’ve known Martin since the mid 1990’s when the company he was running (Viewpoint) bought a company I was chairman of (Thinkfish) and while we haven’t worked together since, he was in fine form on Friday and brought back good memories.

It’s so rewarding to spend a day with young people that are interested in entrepreneurship and venture capital.  I did it again today with Amy where I co-taught a class on Social Entrepreneurship with Lucy Sanders (NCWIT CEO) to a Wellesley College winter session course.  If the future of the US is represented by these young men and women, our future is bright.

I’m not a macroeconomics guy – never have been, never will be.  I don’t watch CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN, or even Fox News.  When I was on the board of several public companies, I used to hit refresh on my My.Yahoo home page about 371 times a day – I no longer have a My.Yahoo home page (or any public company board seats – never again.)

I’ve learned that the day to day macro stuff doesn’t impact what I do.  It’s just noise.  And I have more than enough things that I chose to focus on, so I do my best to consciously filter out the noise.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of listening to CNBC (or Bloomberg – how’s that – I’m not even sure which one it was) while I squeezed in a run on a treadmill before dinner tonight in Boston.  Here’s the great insight that I heard from an "interest rate expert economist dude."

"I was expecting the 0.75% rate cut next week at the FOMC meeting.  It’s great that the Fed stepped up and did the emergency rate cut today.  Now we need to see what next week brings.  I think the market has already priced in another 0.25% to 0.50% rate cut next week at the FOMC meeting."

So what’s he’s really saying is "thanks Mr. Fed – can you now give me some more crack next week when the crack you just gave me gets used up?"

A humorous view on sales executives. 

My apologies to all my friends that are in sales.  I love each and every one of you.  (Thanks for the link Tim.)

Ok – I’m stretching for a clever title for this post.  Several weeks ago I saw two great technical posts from friends. 

The first is from Stan James – the founder of Lijit.  Stan was fiddling around with the idea of short URLs which have been made popular by TinyURL and recently amplified by Twitter.  This is the "short" problem – simply, how do you turn a long url like https://www.feld.com/archives/2007/12/the_glue_that_b.html into something manageable like https://www.feld.com/5v00v that is guaranteed to be unique for all cases.  Stan walks you through the code at Geekout: How To Make Short URL’s.  Yes – it’s simple – and I’m surprised more web services aren’t doing something like this.

The second is from Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon.  Nick is an integral part of the NewsGator software brain trust and has been working hard on several things, including the attention algorithms being used in NewsGator’s products.  In response to the question "I’d be interested in more detail on how you compute the scores [which determine a feed’s attention]. Nothing that gives away your competitive edge of course but just some generalizations of what you are tracking that amounts to attention" Nick responded by posting the current version of his algorithm.  As with all powerful things, it’s simple. 

While I’ve always been a code nerd (even though I can’t program for shit anymore I can read and appreciate a handful of languages), I’ve loved the evolution of code sharing via tech blogging.  I’ve always found that the most confident software developers are willing to share snippets of their code that do important things, in the same ways that experienced entrepreneurs are willing to share ideas.  It’s not the snippet or the idea – it’s the implementation of the entire thing that really matters.