Is anyone here using Google Reader?
I tried using a syndication reader years ago, but I found it too cumbersome to add sites and understand it. Well, it’s a new day, BABY! Google Reader seems perfect for idiots like me. You just have to be sure to keep all of the blogs you read associated with one gmail account, I guess (I have more than one email address).
So I started adding blogs and I am not nearly done. I’m hoping to be able to keep up with my blog reading a lot better.
Now that I see “the other side” of it, here are some things I wish:
1) I wish every blog had a feed link (RSS, Atom, whatever) that is easy to find (or just one ANYWHERE). I was surprised at how many blogs don’t have this. Luckily, with Google Reader, if the blog that is missing a feed link but is on a common free site like blogspot.com or wordpress.com, all you have to do is enter the user name (which is part of the URL) and it can find the feed location for you. However, being able to just click on a link or the feed icon would have saved me plenty of time.
2) I wish blogs would set their syndication feeds to display the entire post. If you have a Wordpress blog, here is how you do it: From your dashboard, go to Settings > Reading. In the “For each article in a feed, show…” select FULL TEXT. Now you may note that I changed my “show the most recent” to 15 for feeds, because some days I make more than one post and I don’t want anyone who checks their feeds only once every few weeks to miss anything. But I wonder if this is too many?
I don’t even PRETEND to know anything about feeds/syndication, any of that stuff. But I have Google Reader working for all but two of the blogs I’ve tried so far.’
I also shirked from feed readers for so long because I’m a layout whore and I love the graphics element of going to web pages individually. But that is time consuming, half the time a page loads and they haven’t made a new post, so the feed reader is more efficient.
Any thoughts?
Entries (RSS)
I use Google Reader at the very least to know if there are updates. Sometimes I read the posts from there, other times I go to the website.
I use Thunderbird for this so it’s right in with my e-mail (I’m old school — no GMail for me! Okay, so I never got an invitation. Now I don’t want to join their stupid party. :p). Once it got above 10 blogs or so it became impossible to check them in the browser, so now the posts come to me. Thunderbird shows the page with the full layout and images, but it doesn’t show videos. Also, you can’t seem to leave comments directly from Thunderbird, but there’s a convenient link to the post in the message headers.
Thunderbird ate a couple of my feeds once, but that was okay. Gave me something to post about.
In answer to your question on my site about getting access to the RSS for my site…um, ???
I don’t know jack about RSS except that you can get quick access to many sites. There ya go, the end of my knowledge about it.
My site just came with it and I never learned much about it. I guess I’ll go check around in the control panel to see if I have something clicked on or off….but I am not promising you much because, as stated, I don’t know much about it at all.
And to be very honest with you, it probably won’t get done, the searching around part, that is, until this weekend when I have some time to spend looking and driving myself insane. I’ll let you know the results in an email once I’ve finished the exploration process.
Or, does the Google Reader thingiejig help you and I don’t need to do anything? Probably not because that would make me very happy. But if it does, let me know so I don’t go crazy and drive ice picks in to my eyeballs this weekend trying to figure it all out.
I use Google Reader because my office blocks bloglines. I actually prefer bloglines, because I hate having to actually click every single post to have it stop showing as unread. But, I guess if that’s my biggest complaint, it’s not so bad.
@Jenn: I think you can change your preferences so it stops doing that.
I like RSSOwl. It works for me, and it’s open source.
Link: http://www.rssowl.org/
Ooooh! I DO I DO!!!!!