It would try the patience of angels

[venta]

Never mind all this popery. The big news of the day is that Google is retiring Google Reader in July.

I use Google Reader, and am thus disappointed. On the plus side, with that gone, I'll have no reason to be signed into my Google account most of the time. I do use Google Docs, but that tends to be an infrequent sign-in-use-sign-out business. And anything which takes me one step away from Google's Giant Data Extraction Vortex is probably a good thing.

I'm lightly surprised, though. Apparently usage of Google Reader is declining. I'm not sure if this is indicative of better software being out there, or of a general decline in RSS use. Maybe all the cool kids use Facetweet as aggregators these days?

So, ladies and gentlemen of LJ, how should I read my RSS feeds in the future?

[Poll #1901989]


(Ars Technica is running a poll on "where should we go instead?", and they probably have a slightly bigger readership than I do. They're also better informed about the large number of RSS readers which rely on Google Reader to work.)

Comments

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Do you get your own kudo there?

We were encouraged to use Omea reader a few years ago when we were encouraged to have development blogs. I can't really recommend it - it was cumbersome to use and kept hanging trying to index things I didn't want it to read. It's entirely possible it's changed since, though.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Do you get your own kudo there?

No, you do :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I read relatively few things in that vein and so use the "syndicate to LJ" option when I do. LJ have broken all the pages I want to go and look at in order to talk about this any more knowledgeably, so I'll leave it there. :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, I'm aware of LJ's syndication. I subscribe y to quite a few things, some of which are high traffic so it wouldn't really work for me. I definitely want the ability to track what I have or haven't read.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't really think it would be your solution. But you asked what we do. :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, of the three people who've currently responded to the poll, everyone uses LJ!

[lnr]

I'm another one I'm afraid - though I do occasionally consider getting a "real" RSS reader instead, or using my web browser's aggregation facilities. (Though does Chrome's rely on Google Reader under the hood? dunno!)

I note the following possibly useful tweets:

https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/312092941478948866
https://twitter.com/InsideFlipboard/status/312030702017335296

(A friend works for Flipboard, hence my interest, it can aggregate bits of Facebook and Twitter and things like the BBC news too - never really played with it in anger though)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, I'll have a look at FlipBoard and at the Lifehacker suggestions. Trouble is, setting up an RSS reader is a bit of a faff, so I only really want to do it once ... but it's pretty much impossible to evaluate an RSS reader without using it. I suspect I'm too lazy to do proper research!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I used to use LJ syndication, until the volume of feeds became too great. The useful thing about Reader (and presumably other decent ones) that LJ lacks* is being able to separate them into categories.

---

* unless you want to start getting fancy with friends list groups I suppose. But then you'd have to have each category in a separate tab or something.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

The other problem with LJ syndication -- which isn't a problem on the stuff _I_ subscribe to but is a pain in the backside on my friendsfriends list -- is that it doesn't handle stuff which is updated very well. So you wind up scrolling back through, e.g., five different versions of a Grauniad article (which are all reproduced in full). Tedious....

[venta.livejournal.com]

People subscribing to the Guardian at all is one of the reasons I never bother with friendsfriends :) Not that I object to the Guardian per se, just that the high traffic means that it swamps everything.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I love that everyone so far has said 'LJ'. I got a load of flak recently for admitting this was how I received my RSS feeds!

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, I found that cheering too! It always astonishes me how frequently it turns out I'm the first person to want to do so when I go to add a new (to me) blog to the LJ syndication page. I'd begun to think I must be the only one who used it, but obviously not after all.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Me too, and me too!

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Me too and me too...though I often get surprised by how often I'm *not* the first...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Not strictly relevantly: do you use an Android app for LJ? If so, which and is it any good?

For $boring_reasons I can't install any LJ apps to try out, but am hoping to get a new phone soon and would be interested to have an app if there is such a thing going.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I don't myself - I just read it via the phone's web browser. But they certainly exist, and some people seem to like them.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what I do at present. My phone's browser is a bit shonky, though, in that it ignores things like <i> and <b> tags - plus you don't get the fun of polls that way :)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

My browser, which is just the standard one that comes with an HTC Desire, handles all of that without a problem, including the polls. So you may well find when you upgrade that you don't need an app.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, good! I was rather hoping that all mobile browsers weren't that rubbish :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Feedly (which is what I'm trying myself now, on sesquipedality's suggestion) seems to be leading the Ars poll at the moment.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, barring any exciting suggestions here, I think Feedly is going to be my first port of call. Though Wikipedia's description of it as "stylized as an actual magazine" did put me off slightly.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That's the default layout, but it can easily be (un-)stylized to look pretty much like Google Reader.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks, that's useful info!

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I'm trying all the suggestions in http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/14/0033230/google-reader-being-retired, nothing seems as good as Google Reader. Sods!

[venta.livejournal.com]

They buried Google Reader darkly, at dead of night, the sods!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I feel obliged to explain why I use LJ for my RSS when it is plainly bad at it...

Last time I was reorganising my general online everything, it occurred to me that the reason RSS was so useful wasn't because it solved a problem, but because it saved me from bothering to solve a problem. The problem in question being to answer the question: What do I want to read?

I therefore decided to do one of two things with any RSS feed I found:

1) If it was low-volume and I 100% definitely wanted never to miss a post, Syndicate it to LJ. That way it appears in a location I already read.
2) If it was high volume and/or I didn't mind missing individual posts, bookmark it^[1].

This was a massive improvement. Previously I either missed good stuff in my RSS feed because it became unmanageable or I was left without anything to read sometimes due to natural variation in posting rates. Now I read the essential stuff and if I want more I scroll through my list of blogs until I find something I feel like reading.

Now actually, this scheme has been starting to fail again recently, but that's for complex reasons which RSS wouldn't solve, so I won't bore you with the details.

---

[1] Not, in my case, literal bookmarks. Everyone has their own favourite ways of saving links.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I can see the logic of your argument :)

However, I don't think I miss things in my RSS reader, because it clearly marks which feeds have unread items. Unread item on Tim Harford's blog? I'll get on it. Unread items in BoingBoing? Well, yeah, natural order of things, that. Leave them for when I've run out of stuff/have an excess of time.

(I've also organised things into directories, so I can just hide the "Dross" directory to stop it being distracting.)

It also makes it easier to prioritise reading things I care more about first, whereas LJ is just a big ol' linear list of stuff, and thus I'd probably lose track of things I'd otherwise go back and read at lower priority. (This could be improved by LJ custom friends lists, and things, I imagine. Interestingly, I regularly note from my server logs that people often give their custom lists quite revealing names ;)

Not suggesting you ought to do the same, of course! Just that I think my way is superior for me :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a very good system. I don't get on well with "unread" flags, because my default reading mode is to briefly glance at items as they come in and then read them later when I have time.

[venta.livejournal.com]

So do I :)

Google Reader shows me the summary, and looking at the summary doesn't affect the readness. Once you've opened the full article, it gets auto-marked as read, but is trivial to tell it "keep as unread" if you want to come back later. (There is also a concept of "starring" articles to mark them as come-back-to-later, but I use that for something different.)

I guess I've devised this strategy because it's how Google Reader works, which means it's kind of defined my requirements :-\

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Although that's not the worst way to approach things. My relationship to GMail is very similar: I use a range of different tags and coloured stars and search keywords to organise it all and if I ever move to a different email provider I'm dooomed!

[venta.livejournal.com]

it's amazing how frequently service providers fail to realise this. My email provider (whom I pay ;) recently massively overhauled their interface and released it without warning, and without any documentation, and without any advertised mechanism for going back to the old UI. And then were slightly surprised by the reaction.

(Historically they've been quite clueful, but being taken over by Oracle doesn't seem to have done them any good at all.)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

being taken over by Oracle

Oh... oh no! I'm very sorry. :-(

[venta.livejournal.com]

Although the sympathy is appreciated, it may not be justified: that was a really poor example of me spelling Opera!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

You got four of the five letters. That's basically a win.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

I really just need someone that will cache things to read offline, since do most of my blog reading on the tube to work. I tried lots of iOS readers that were unsatisfactory or ended up being discontinued, and settled on Byline which seems to do the trick. Going to give Feedly a try now.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

My brief experiment with Wordpress.com's Reader feature has left me reeling in disgust. It has no way to prioritise (it's all date order). The only view I could generate was a river of previews - no way to just get headlines. And it also appears to have sent a notification that I'd subscribed to every single Wordpress.com blog that I have in my list of feeds, which is not something I expected or wanted. (And I only found out because several bloggers contacted me about it. Luckily they believed my "I'm experimenting with different feed readers" explanation.)

On the plus side, the import from the Google XML/OPML dump went without a hitch.

I'm going to stop messing around and wait at least a week or two and see what's happened by then. Most of the services that look promising are totally mullered by the traffic at the moment. And I strongly suspect that the situation will look quite different in a month's time, and we have until 1 July.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, having seen this morning's feeding frenzy, I figured "give it a couple of weeks" is the best advice :)

I claimed first thing this morning that I didn't require much in the way of features for my RSS reader. It turns out that actually I do, because things I'd regarded as "things which are in the nature of RSS readers" turn out to be features. It sounds like WordPress's reader may be one which I wish to avoid!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

More reasons not to use WordPress: it automatically defaulted to sending me email notifications each and every time someone posted to one of the "blogs I follow", which was my entire GReader set. I only discovered this when I went to check my email a few hours later and found my inbox as stuffed with bacn as I've ever seen it. (Even exceeding the previous record when a shared to-do list tool decided to send me notifications every time anyone added a new item, marked an item done, edited anything, moved items between lists, changed the people responsible, etc.)

There's no way to mass unsubscribe (that I could find) - you need to go in to each individual entry and change the settings. It was easier to simply delete all of them, but even there it required two clicks per blog, and then several refreshes each time the page/JSON/AJAX/whatever shiny tech they were using got confused by my rapid clicking and decided I was subscribed to a negative number of entries.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

In fairness I should add that, while it sucks profoundly as an RSS reader tool for me, I find WordPress.com is bloody brilliant as a blog host, and I've been a very happy customer with work-related blogs there for getting on for a decade.