Wednesday, February 6, 2008

RSS Activity

Alright, I have continued along the Blue 2.0 program and was happy to find that I had already basically completed the "Explore a Feed Reader" activity. As soon as I saw Blue 2.0 had a feed I went ahead and added it. I believe that was some time before the first set of activities.

I did use Google Reader (hereafter abbreviated as GR) instead of Bloglines, since that is my reader of choice. I used to use Bloglines, but became a GR convert sometime last year.

I'm going to give a couple of reasons why I prefer GR, in case anyone out there is deciding on which reader to use. Keep in mind that I haven't used Bloglines in several months so it's possible that they've updated their interface and have picked up some of these GR advantages. In any case:

1. Read or Not? - When viewing a feed in GR individual posts are only marked as read once I have scrolled past them. In Bloglines all posts would appear as read as soon as I viewed the first entry.

2. Oldest or Newest First? - In GR I can choose, on a feed by feed basis, to view by oldest or view by newest. So feeds that I don't keep up with on a daily basis I can set so that the new posts appear first. Feeds that I obsessively read every post from can be viewed with the oldest showing up first so that I don't miss a single delicious morsel, and so I don't see posts referring to older posts that I haven't had time to read yet.

3. It's Purty - I think GR looks a little nicer, but they really are quite similar.

4. Other Fun Bits - I don't use most of this stuff very much, but you can view your reading trends, apply tags, and quickly clean out inactive feeds.

1 comment:

Stacey Greenwell said...

I switch back and forth with Google Reader (I've exported my feeds a couple of times now) but I still haven't made the permanent switch. I like how Bloglines looks on my Treo and I like the package tracking option. The beta version of Bloglines looks purty much like Google Reader, but I switched back to old school Bloglines. I prefer the simpler display. Guess I'll have to upgrade or make the switch eventually. I've tried the Outlook 2007 built-in reader and don't like it much either, despite the simplicity of having it right there with my calendar, email, etc. I debated which reader to use for Blue 2.0 but ultimately chose Bloglines since it's easy and there's a lot of documentation. But please feel free to use whatever you wish!