thoughts.on.code

So, I while ago now I stated that I was eliminating all of the extra blog feeds in my life. For the most part that is what happened. I stopped reading blogs except for friends, aquaintences , and a few really good ones. Other than that, I was done.

There were two reasons for me reducing my time in blogs. First, it just too much time. I was spending a large portion of my day in a mode halfway between doing something and reading something. And I much prefer doing.

The second is that Bloglines was a major source of angst and frustration for me. In fact, when I simplified, I just left my bloglines account as it was and started anew in Google Reader.

Initially I did not care so much for GReader, but it was not bad, and was less anger inducing then bloglines. But just a few days ago Google released an update to GReader that makes it WAAAAY better than anything else I have looked at so far.

One of the things on my Projects-To-Do list was a feed reader that works:

1. Allow me to indicate saved versus to-read articles. GReader addresses this through tagging.
2. Read one article at a time. Bloglines would let you click on a feed, and that instantly reads all of the unread articles in said feed. It REALLY sucks when you accidentally double-click the link.
3. Does not show me what I am missing. Bloglines shows how many items are not read and how many are “Kept as new”. When you are skimming through a list of unread articles, your only choices are to read it then, or mark it keep as new. I also want to be able to save the article for reference. This was THE major problem for me. I could not always (immediately) tell if I was reading something for the first time. It was driving me insane.

Google Reader handles all of these things in a nice, easy to use manner. Thanks Google!