Trialing Google Reader
Sun, 15 October, 2006 – 5:52 pm
I've read a few posts on Google Reader so I thought I'd give it a go especially as the new upgrades makes it sound pretty good for mobile browsing. In the past I've been using an offline feedreader Omea, however it was getting clogged up with old posts and posts from sites I just wasn't reading. After trimming down my reading list I've still been finding that I'm missing out on one blog or another mainly due to me reading feeds off 2 different laptops plus my PDA. So I figured that I'd compile them all into one online place and just keep my absolute favourites on my PDA's feedreader for offline reading when I can't get a web connection.
First impressions are good. I've got about 20 feeds in my reader, all in various folders. At the moment I can't see how to make a feed known it's read without having to click 'Mark as read'. I'm used to either viewing the feed in a single page or all feeds automatically being marked as read once I've been in the folder for X amount of time. You can flag up certain feeds with a star so it's not like leaving it as unread is essential (although I'll admit I do that with emails and not use the flags!). Of course some sites I've already read all of the posts on so going into the feed and clicking 'Mark all as read' is handy however it doesn't seem to work when the feed is in the root folder. It uses AJAX for a lot of these jobs so perhaps that's getting a little confused.
Being able to import from an OPML file helped, plus I have a subscribe link on my toolbar for any new sites I want to look at. My only gripe at present is to be able to subscribe to a site AND save it into a folder at the same time. I can't seem to find a way to do this so you have to go into Manage subscriptions and then put the feed into the folder of choice and then return to the reader which is too many steps in my opinion. Of course I don't add feeds that often and have seriously cut down on the amount I subscribe to as I found (and still find to be honest) that I read more blogs which takes up all my time and leaves me with little time to blog myself!
I'll have a play with the mobile version on my PDA tonight. If I could download the feeds via this one site to my PDA and also mark them all as read that would be great but somehow I can't see it!
Update: Since using it properly I've discovered that when you open a feed and have a post visible in the screen it's marked as read automatically, so no need to click 'Mark as read' which makes for much easier reading.
So far am impressed at the ease of Google Reader. Still not had a chance to try it on the PDA but will let you know how that works too.
By Sarah on Mon, 16 October, 2006