I’ve found my Livejournal “friends page” to be increasingly cumbersome as a feed aggregation and reading service. Liz has fallen in love with Pulp Fiction and uses it religiously. PF is great for reading JL friends–since it can remember cookies, one can see all of one’s friends’ friends-only posts. But Liz tends to live entirely on one computer, whereas I am sometimes at my Mac Pro, sometimes on the hand-me-down Powerbook, and sometimes (okay, usually) at work. This variety of machines is where PF falls down, as there’s no easy way to keep track of what I have and haven’t read across all of them.
And then I remembered that Google had released a Google Reader a while back to solve this problem, so I’ve decided to give it a whirl. So far it’s proven to be tremendously convenient and useful, with the only downside that it’s unsuitable for reading content that is protected or otherwise requires authentication.
What is anyone else doing to make life in RSS-land less painful and tedious?
- Mood:geeky
- Music:Coldplay & Buena Vista Social Club - “Clocks”
10 responses so far ↓
I can easily spend hours a day on Google Reader if I’m not careful. I’ve taken to consuming an insane amount of content through it.
I also really like the built in keyboard shortcuts. j,k for down and up (a la vi). v will view the article at it’s original post (which, thanks to my Firefox settings automatically opens it in a new tab). And because I’ve gone so overboard, all but two high volume feeds are divided into different groups/folders/labels/what-have-you, and I can use gl (”Go to Label”) and then start typing the first one or two characters of the label I want to go to. Likewise, I can go directly to a certain feed (”subscription”) with gu (Go to sUbscription). ga takes me directly to “All Items”, gs to “Starred Items”, gh to “Home”. s of course toggles the star on an item.
There’s others, of course, but those are the ones I’ve used. I literally don’t even use my mouse in Google Reader anymore, and I *love* that.
I do have two big complaints about Google Reader, though:
1) It’s ability to count only goes up to “100+”.
2) It’s a Google product, where the hell is the “Search”?! If I want to easily be able to find something again later, I can Star it and then go to my Starred items later, but if I didn’t have the foresight to do that then I’m dependent exclusively on my memory to find it. Granted, I’m not aware of such functionality in other feed readers, but still, it’s Google.
Sweet. Thanks for the advice — that definitely cements my interest in Reader as the official Way of the Future(tm)!
What do you do for auth-required content?
That’s the gotcha. I’m not aware of a web based solution to that. My only authenticated feed is my LJ friends page, and when looking into it once not long ago, I learned it’s supposedly possible to do with Thunderbird if you have a paid LJ account and you append a certain argument to the feed URL that tells it to check for the presence of a cookie, but I didn’t see an obvious way to give Thunderbird the “I’m authenticated” cookie (albeit, my interest was starting to wane by then).
So now I have three tabs constantly open in Firefox: Gmail, LJ Friends, and Google Reader. And to make the three constant tabs be less in the way, I “minimize” them with Faviconize Tab.
Okay, the lack of search is a little bizarre. But it is still only in the “labs” status….
Dude, I’m going to run out of gold stars to give you.
Thanks — faviconize is pretty sweet.
Though my solution to the “too many primary tabs” problem (GMail, Reader, Google homepage, LJ) is to just have ‘em in a separate Firefox window and minimize it when I don’t need it. Or shove it onto a different monitor if I’m at work.
I’m just a gold star fiend. =)
The only problem for me with the separate window for the semi-permanent tabs is that almost all of my other tabs get opened from one of those three, so it ends up in the same window as them (or worse, each link in its own window).
But occasionally if I’m opening up a bunch of links that aren’t coming from one of those three primary tabs, then I’ll throw them in a separate window (which I actually just did last night when Liz & I were looking for potential wedding photographers, but that’s not something I do frequently).
But that’s just to fit my usage patterns. Obviously that may work great for you. =)
I think the new-tabs-open-from-that-window problem is actually an OK thing for me at work, since I can keep recreational surfing separate from my other workflow. Apple’s Exposé is also tremendously helpful in my work life, much more so than I would have expected. I mean, I’m used to it from home, but it’s super-nice to have at work (and not just because it awes coworkers).
BTW, that is a freaking awesome icon.
Hehehe, yeah, I saw it shortly after the Wii released when the wrist straps kept breaking. I couldn’t resist making an icon out of it. =) Thanks!