Things you may have missed on currybetdotnet over Christmas

If you are one of those people finding yourself back at work or back online for the first time since before Christmas, then you may well find yourself faced with a mountain of unread email and RSS feeds. So here are two little things that may help.

Firstly, some advice about RSS feeds that I've given in FUMSI, and in rather fewer characters for journalism.co.uk - just take the plunge and mark them all as read:

"If you are suddenly overwhelmed because you have 1,500 unread items in your RSS feeds after a week's break from work - simply scrub them out. If one of the stories you've erased was huge news, the chances are that people will still be talking about it a week later anyway. By giving yourself a clean slate you'll most likely only miss a few interesting teacup storms, rather than any big developments."

If you can't quite bring yourself to do that, I can at least provide one shortcut - here is a quick guide to what you missed on currybetdotnet over the last couple of weeks.

• Most popular posts of the year - a quick two part run through of the twenty most popular posts from 2008 (The Buffy post was high up there, but people searching for Bapy P's killers and Edison Chen pushed those articles to #2 and #1). The most popular posts from yesteryear also got a countdown, with the triple whammy of posts about the iPlayer leading the way.
• Least popular posts of the year - Chris Applegate wondered what the most unpopular currybetdotnet content of the year was, and it turned out that writing about FUMSI, Chipwrapper, Fansivu and going on and on and on and on about "Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google" were the turn-offs.
• I got more mileage from my year's supply of Delicious bookmark links, by putting together a four part list of links from 2008 which I still found amusing, informative and interesting.
• I went to the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum, and thoroughly enjoyed it. My review got mentioned in Atheism Examiner in the US, and decided at least one person on whether to go and see it. Shame the Natural History Museum doesn't have an affiliate scheme.

• I announced that I'm going to be running a one day course about blogging - "Learn to blog smart: join the conversation" - in February in association with journalism.co.uk. You can book a place here.
• I got told to leave a cafè near Borough market called Patisserie Lila, because "we're not allowed to have laptops here". Weird.

• I blogged about my ongoing TV Licence saga, whereby TV Licensing have charged me for a duplicate licence and helped themselves to the money for it from my bank account, but are now making me jump through hoops and prove that I deserve a refund.
• I listed some of my favourite new blog subscriptions of 2008.
• And I seemed to get most response from blogging about not getting to see teddy bears parachuting off a Muswell Hill church tower.