Archive for the 'RSS readers' Category

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.

Google Reader vs Bloglines

Published on 30 November 2006 in RSS readers and experiment. 11 Comments

For the last day or so I have been experimenting with Google Reader, seeing how it treats RSS feeds. RSS is a wonderful way to keep up with everything that’s happening out in the blogosphere, and in the Internet as a whole - I can’t imagine life before it.

I prefer web-based RSS readers, because I use my computer at home as much as my computer at work, and because at work I use a minimum of three different computers every week. Web-based means I don’t have to worry about synchronising my reader - I can pick up where I left off, wherever I am. I haven’t been using RSS for that long, and my current, and until now preferred, reader has been Bloglines. Until now, you ask?

Well, I’m not sure I can say that Google Reader has ousted Bloglines from its pedestal just yet, but the little experiment I’ve been conducting has made me wonder whether or not I should be using other tools for my subscriptions. For the past couple of weeks or so I’ve been wondering about certain feeds and whether updates were being displayed in a timely manner in Bloglines. Some usually frequently updated sites were not updating in Bloglines. Some feeds seemed to have “stalled” in Bloglines, with no new updates after a particular date. This blog was a case in point - the problem seems to have fixed itself now: Bloglines is updating again - but for almost a week there, new posts weren’t appearing. Sage, the RSS reader I use as a tester with Firefox, was displaying updates, so I didn’t think it was a problem with Blogger Beta…

The experiment has been very very simple. I imported my Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader and just observed which feeds were updating in both readers. I can report that for some feeds, Google Reader seems to be much faster than Bloglines when it comes to displaying updates.

For instance, using Google Reader, I read, at around 1pm yesterday, that Kathryn is going to have some explaining to do (the Yellow Wiggle’s retired). I didn’t notice this update in Bloglines until that evening (8:38pm).

Also, at around that time yesterday evening Google Reader displayed an update of Ponderance. Ponderance is a Blogger blog - is this an issue? This morning, Bloglines still hasn’t registered any updates.

Julie Leung finally blogged after a long silence yesterday (I’m pleased, I enjoy Julie’s writing)! This, again, was brought to me by Google Reader last night. Bloglines only registered the update this morning…

Other feeds that are displaying updates in Google Reader this morning (but not in Bloglines): Ampersand Duck, Justine Larbalestier, Two Peas, No Pod (two new posts I think), Mooiness, Pegasus Librarian… I’m not going to list them all, but you get the picture. (Some feeds seem to be updating at roughly the same times in both readers, of course. Bloglines is not universally slower than Google Reader.)

I’m not sure what this means. Am I just being picky?

Update 7:48am: This post has just appeared in Google Reader, timestamped 7:33am. Nothing in Bloglines as yet. I’m not sure how long I’ll maintain this experiment (it’s kind of doing my head in to have to monitor not one, but two readers) - we’ll see.