google reader – D’Arcy Norman dot net

reclaim your rss feed reader

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favourite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

Translation: Thanks for letting us mine your activity and data for a few years. We’ve decided you just don’t make enough money for us, and we’ve decided to stop using your activity to feed into our search algorithm. You are no use to us anymore. We’re killing Reader. End transmission.

Translation 2: Using a web page to read feeds is emasculating.

I’m not at all surprised by this. (remember iGoogle?)

But there is an easy way to reclaim your feed reader, so nobody can take it away from you, or cripple it, or mine your activities and data.

I switched to Fever˚ a couple of years ago, migrating all of my feeds from Google Reader. And haven’t looked back. It’s not free – it costs a whopping $30 for a license. But the licensing fee goes to support a fantastic developer, and means that there are no ads or data mining or anything skanky.

Here’s my current Fever˚ “Hot” dashboard:

Screen Shot 2013 03 13 at 6 40 39 PM

Here’s my “★★★★★” folder of must-read feeds:

Screen Shot 2013 03 13 at 6 46 31 PM

Here’s my “Photos” folder – mostly from Flickr users, but also people posting photos elsewhere. All in one handy feed display:

Screen Shot 2013 03 13 at 6 47 42 PM

It’s also got a great iOS app, Reeder (which is best on the iPhone – pixel doubled on iPad for some reason).

Screenshot of “hot” items in Reeder on my godphone:

And the five-star feed folder:

You can still “share” items – you can expose an RSS feed for items you star within Fever•, and – wait for it – anyone can subscribe to that feed, using any reader that hasn’t been “sunsetted” by a giant corporation. I display my “shared” items on a page on my blog, powered by a self-hosted instance of Alan’s awesome Feed2JS tool.

It’s my Fever˚. No company can decide to “sunset” it. Well, I guess Shaun can decide to abandon it, but even if that happens, the software is running on my server, so worst case scenario I don’t get updates provided by him (through the fantastic automated software updater, btw).

Anyway. Google kills Reader. Not surprising. If you’re still relying on anything Google provides, it’s now shame on you. Reclaim your stuff.

1 Month with Google Reader

I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.

The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses – I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

I do like the “trends” view in GR. Not because it is helpful in organizing or accessing information (it isn’t), but it’s kinda interesting in its own right. Here’s a screenshot as of 5 minutes ago:

I’m a bit surprised at just how much I’m reading. Almost 18,000 items in a month? I’d have never guessed that. Actually, almost half of that isn’t really “reading” per se, but “viewing”. Photos from Flickr. Which is why the “photo gallery” view would be great.

There are some shortcomings.

I’ve got a nagging feeling that by using GR, I am continuing to “feed the beast” – by teaching Google about what interests me, and by providing guidance about relationships between feeds and items.
There isn’t a “blogroll” or live OPML view of my tags/folders. BlogBridge lets me publish tags as live OPML documents, which is how my edublogs directory is managed. There isn’t currently a way to replicate that from within GR. Yes, I could periodically export a tag as an OPML file, and post that somewhere. Not the same.

All in all, I think I’ll keep using Google Reader for now. I’ll have to figure out how to reconcile my feed subscriptions with BB so that I can keep maintaining the edublogs directory, but that will work itself out somehow.

Heading back to BlogBridge

I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.

I couldn't do it.

My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you've come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they're all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.

GR has no real concept of ratings for feeds. I can star feed items, but not feeds. I can tag a feed with "5 stars" or the like, but GR doesn't know to treat that feed any differently (like bubble items from a "5 star" feed to the top of a list, etc…

So, I'm back to BlogBridge. Ahhhh… that's better. There's no place like home…

I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.

I couldn't do it.

So, I'm back to BlogBridge. Ahhhh… that's better. There's no place like home…

Trying Google Reader Again

I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.

But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.

So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.

I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:

I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).

Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader…

I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.