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For ages now I've been saying that I should get a real RSS aggregator rather than using LiveJournal syndication feeds (which, since I still haven't paid for my LJ account, I can't create myself, so I had to wait until someone else created them). Well, a few weeks ago I read about Google Reader on the Google Blog, advertised as "your inbox for the web". I was a little confused what this meant, but it's simply an RSS/Atom aggregator using an AJAX interface similar to GMail. So I decided to try it out; I moved all my LJ syndication feeds and added a few other sites that had never had LJ feeds. I also started using the RSS feeds from BoardGameGeek, which I'm finding a lot easier to deal with than the "notify me of new content" checkbox for each game, which results in a bunch of links sent via GeekMail a few times a day.
So far I'm pretty happy with it. Like LiveJournal, it sorts things in reverse chronological order (most recent on top), which I hate, but unlike LJ it remembers what you've read and you can have it only display new things, which makes the sorting less of an issue. Now that I've started using a bunch of feeds from friends' sites, I have two suggestions to make: one is to choose a unique title, rather than something generic like "Rants & Raves" or "notes". Fortunately Google Reader lets you assign a new name to a feed, but it's a little bit of a pain. The other is to have a comments feed; some sites have it and some don't, I'm guessing based on what out-of-the-box software they're using, which probably means that the ones that don't have it can't easily add it without switching to different software. But being able to keep up with conversations in comments is really nice, and I wish this were more prevalent.
Speaking of keeping up with comments, I've been using the LiveJournal event tracker system to get comments sent to the Message Center. It's great to not have to go back and revisit old posts to look for new comments, but the tracker interface sucks. You have to decide for each post you read whether you want to subscribe to comments, and for unpaid accounts you only get 25 events you can track, so when you hit the limit you have to go and delete the oldest ones first. The limit is higher for paid accounts, but I don't think it's unlimited, so you're eventually going to have to deal with that, which is a huge pain. Also, the comments show up in the Message Center in a flat list, 15 per page, with no context. Threaded comments are the biggest reason I haven't switched to reading LiveJournal via RSS as well, but if I'm reading most comments via the Message Center I'm not getting the threading anyway, so I may end up switching pretty soon.
Anyway, back to Google Reader: I've recently started hitting the "share" button on interesting articles, and you can view all the articles I've shared. It also has an RSS feed of its own. I'll probably still post here about particularly interesting things I run across, but you can use that feed to also see the not-quite-interesting-enough-to-post-about stuff-that-I-read-via-RSS.
So far I'm pretty happy with it. Like LiveJournal, it sorts things in reverse chronological order (most recent on top), which I hate, but unlike LJ it remembers what you've read and you can have it only display new things, which makes the sorting less of an issue. Now that I've started using a bunch of feeds from friends' sites, I have two suggestions to make: one is to choose a unique title, rather than something generic like "Rants & Raves" or "notes". Fortunately Google Reader lets you assign a new name to a feed, but it's a little bit of a pain. The other is to have a comments feed; some sites have it and some don't, I'm guessing based on what out-of-the-box software they're using, which probably means that the ones that don't have it can't easily add it without switching to different software. But being able to keep up with conversations in comments is really nice, and I wish this were more prevalent.
Speaking of keeping up with comments, I've been using the LiveJournal event tracker system to get comments sent to the Message Center. It's great to not have to go back and revisit old posts to look for new comments, but the tracker interface sucks. You have to decide for each post you read whether you want to subscribe to comments, and for unpaid accounts you only get 25 events you can track, so when you hit the limit you have to go and delete the oldest ones first. The limit is higher for paid accounts, but I don't think it's unlimited, so you're eventually going to have to deal with that, which is a huge pain. Also, the comments show up in the Message Center in a flat list, 15 per page, with no context. Threaded comments are the biggest reason I haven't switched to reading LiveJournal via RSS as well, but if I'm reading most comments via the Message Center I'm not getting the threading anyway, so I may end up switching pretty soon.
Anyway, back to Google Reader: I've recently started hitting the "share" button on interesting articles, and you can view all the articles I've shared. It also has an RSS feed of its own. I'll probably still post here about particularly interesting things I run across, but you can use that feed to also see the not-quite-interesting-enough-to-post-about stuff-that-I-read-via-RSS.
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Re: Riddle me this
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Re: Riddle me this