Archive for the 'RSS readers' Category

IE 7 ruined my RSS

Published on 8 March 2007 in RSS readers, RSS and email. 3 Comments

IE 7 ruined my Keeping Up to Date, database alerts/RSS class. It was the only browser available on the computers in the library training room, and the fact that it automatically, neatly handles RSS feeds and displays them in a nice readable manner meant that I couldn’t make my point that (for non-IE 7 users) RSS feeds display as almost unreadable, very off-putting gibberish. I shouldn’t grumble too much, as this just shows that I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been.

I mentioned that I wasn’t sure what online RSS reader to show the class - I ended up showing them both Google Reader and Bloglines. Of course I pointed out IE 7’s built-in reader - but I left it at that. None of the attendees were already using IE 7. (I could have asked about Firefox, I suppose, I don’t know why I didn’t.) Although this class was different in that four of the sixteen attendees had actually heard of RSS (usually none of the class will have heard of it), I could see that many of them were finding the concept a bit difficult to grasp. Still, a few of the students looked mildly interested, and one student actually stayed behind, set up her reader (Google) and confirmed with me that a New Zealand news site she was interested in subscribing to had no feeds.

One of the attendees who knew a bit about RSS had a chat with me about why I thought people aren’t using RSS more widely. I think that RSS isn’t as easy to use as it could be, although this is changing with aggregator options being built into email clients and web browsers. I also think that using RSS hasn’t become habitual, like email is. Whenever I’ve shown people email and RSS as options for keeping informed, the majority are quite happy to use email to receive alerts and subscriptions, but seem to baulk at the thought of having to check Something Else.

How much resistance was there to using email when The Internet first entered the popular consciousness? I seem to remember that there was some, but I could be imagining things. Anyone know?

Sharing stuff using Google Reader

Published on 27 February 2007 in RSS readers, Google Reader, RSS and sharing. 3 Comments
Non-RSS readers of this blog (are there [m]any of you out there?) may have noticed that I’ve been adding a series of links listed as Reading on the right of the page, right next to the most recent post.

This is a list generated thanks to Google Reader, which allows you to “share” blog posts as you go through them. I like this feature very much - such a nifty way of marking and pointing to interesting posts and creating a link blog. Apart from embedding these links in your blog, they’ve also made it possible for you to share your entire link blog, should you want to. Robert Scoble shares his (there’s a link on his blog), as does Steven Cohen (he’s also got a post asking people to share the links to their shared items).

One feature I do wish was available as part of the shared items feature, is the ability to annotate an item (a la del.icio.us).

I’m still maintaining (ie I haven’t deleted) my Bloglines account, but that is because I use it when I show people how to use RSS. I still haven’t worked out what I’m going to use instead of Bloglines in the classroom situation. Google Reader is fine and works very well, but the fact that you need a Google account to use it might be an obstacle to some. Although you could argue that you need a Bloglines account to use Bloglines (a Yahoo account to use Yahoo, a Yahoo account to use Flickr- bah!, a del.icio.us account to use del.icio.us…). I have a keeping-up-to-date (alerting services and RSS) class to teach next week, it’ll all come to a head then, I suspect.

More on Google Reader

Published on 15 January 2007 in quibble, RSS readers, blogs and experiment. 5 Comments

Despite saying that I would be using both Bloglines and Google Reader because Bloglines seemed to be slow (and for the sake of comparison), I’ve actually been using Google Reader exclusively for the last few weeks. It was too much work to use two readers to read the same feeds, and I thought I’d just give Google Reader a go for a while and see how it went. I can report that I have been quite pleased with its performance, and at this point, see no reason to go back to Bloglines.

The only (minor) quibble I have with Google Reader is that any text a blogger may present in a light colour, like yellow, for instance, is faithfully reproduced in the reader, but with a white background, making it rather difficult to read the text in question. Of course, on the original blog, such lightly coloured text is usually displayed on a dark background and is quite clear. One of my favourite litblogs, Bibliobibuli, illustrates this problem.

This is the blog as it appears in Google Reader. The red arrows point to the ‘problem’ text.

And here is the original blog - all quite readable, of course.

(And should you want to read the post the screenshots depict, do! It’s here.)

The same post, as it appears in Bloglines, is also quite readable.

Hopefully Google fixes this sometime soon.

Yesterday I noted a nice feature: the personalised Trends that Google Reader generates of your feed reading habits.

The screenshot shows my Top 10 Reading Trends for the last thirty days.

It looks like Global Voices Online and Scobleizer are the blogs with the most posts that I look at most regularly. Third in the list is Kathryn’s blog!

The percentage of read posts for some feeds would probably be higher if I hadn’t had a week off last week (i.e. I would normally have read all of those feeds).

Other blogs that are in the Top Forty:
food pornographer, JadedLotus, Walt at Random, Mooiness, Random Acts of Reality, RobandWend’s Ramblings, Terra Nova, Pegasus Librarian, Rambling Librarian, Orange Crate Art, Moment to Moment, languagehat…

Screenshots in this post created by Snapper, one of my favourite Firefox addons.

Addendum: I didn’t add a link to the Trends page because it won’t work for you unless you are a Google Reader user. If you’d like to read more about the personalised trends, take a look at “I like big charts and I cannot lie”, from the official Google Reader blog.