Welcome to Picks of the month, where I share a few things I have found useful the last month.

It can be anything from blog posts and software tools to books and techniques.

#1 Feedbin

Last week, I wrote about my RSS feeds and at the same time mentioned Feedbin.

Feedbin is a fast and simple RSS feed reader with great features for reading and saving.

I can easily navigate through feedbin without touching the mouse, which is great! I can also view entire articles inline in Feedbin.

You can easily share the articles you read to Pocket (for reading later, which I use all the time!), Evernote (for storage) or any of the other services that Feedbin integrates with.

It aslo has several smooth themes for better readability. It’s just a nice and simple feed reader. All feeds saved in feedbin can usual be read by most mobile RSS readers too (like Reeder).

It costs $3 a month (or $30 a year), but it’s money well spent in my opinion. You can also take it for a trial run.

(No, I don’t get anything for praising this service. I use it all the time and love it - so I thought perhaps you might enjoy it as well!)

#2 Running

I have trained up my legs for a year now with walking and small jogging bursts. I am finally at the point where I can actually run about 3-5 km (from time to time) without having much pain in my legs.

The feeling you get when you get in the rhythm while running is just fantastic. Time goes by like nothing. It takes some time to be able to really enjoy it, but once you do, it’s well worth it.

There are many reasons why developers should run, but a few of them are:

Running makes you less stressed out
- There are some questions about exactly why running/exercise reduces stress, but the only sure thing is that it does reduce it. And every developer feels the everyday stress a bit, and getting more leveled again is probably a good thing.
Running make you more productive
- If you body is in good shape, so is your brain. And also, when sitting down most of the day, you can get in bad shape pretty quickly. When you are in bad shape, you and your brain will get exhausted much sooner.
Running helps prevent programmer-diseases
- Tendinitises, diabetes, back problems and so on. All things that running prevent or at least help ward against. It also helps against all of those if you already have them.

#3 Stop, think, research, debug

The last pick is a blog post by Scott Hanselman.

He mostly talks about how a listener from his podcast learned a valuable lesson from doing some thinking and research before diving into the debugging and code-prodding we usually do.

Understanding the problem you are trying to fix, before your try to fix it, can in many cases save you a lot of time. If you want to get inspired to be a better debugger, take a quick read through this post:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/StopThinkResearchDebug.aspx

Follow me on Twitter: @gjermundbjaanes